Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.
Highlights this week: Richard MacManus ended 2007 with a review of the top 10 Web Tech stories of the year. Marshall Kirkpatrick produced an awesome toolkit to keep track of Web Tech trends in 2008; he also showed how to fall in love with tagging again and asked some big questions on privacy in the Web age. Josh Catone offered a guide to Online Giving to start the new year and he explored how the Web is affecting the US presidential primaries.
Web News
It was naturally a quiet news week, being the first week of 2008. But the Web had a significant part to play in the US Presidential primaries, which kicked off this week in Iowa. Josh Catone wrote pre-Iowa that if the web were an indicator of political results, then Ron Paul and Barack Obama would likely be squaring off in the US presidential elections next November. But with the first state contest out of the way, it looks like the web was only half right (any maybe didn’t have much to do with it at all). Obama, who was in a statistical tie with Hillary Clinton and John Edwards according to pre-caucus polls, convincingly defeated his rivals. Paul, however, finished fifth – exactly where he was polling – and still no where near the winner, Mike Huckabee, who collected 34% of the vote to Paul’s 10%.
Trends
What’s Next on the Web: a ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008
This is a MUST READ post by Marshall Kirkpatrick, in which he outlines 5 big topical trends in Web Technology in 2008. He also provides the following resources:
* An OPML file of top blogs on each subject. This is a bundle of feeds you can import into your reader.
* A filtered RSS feed of just the most popular items regarding each topic (using AideRSS). Remember, whenever you subscribe to new RSS feeds – some of the magic won’t be visible until you mark all the initial items as read and new ones come in again.
* A Custom Search Engine that you can bookmark and use to search inside the top news and reference sites regarding each topic.
5 Ways You Can Fall in Love With Tagging Again
Tagging content online is something that doesn’t seem to have taken off the way some people expected it to.
Is it too complicated for widespread adoption? Is it too arbitrary to have the impact that formal taxonomies offer? Is it just too much work while you’re zipping around the web? Who knows – what’s important is that tagging web pages can still be very useful!
Marshall stopped using social bookmarking tools for a big part of 2007 because saving things for his own future reference wasn’t enough motivation to invest the time required. In the latter half of the year, though, he’s seen what some other people are doing to make it worthwhile again. Here’s five and a half ways you can fall in love with tagging URLs again.
Related:The Glory, Bliss and How-to of Screen Scraping for RSS
Is it Time to Declare Music Downloads a Loss Leader?
Radiohead’s widely heralded experiment with free downloads plus a premium package and request for donations (effectively) remains shrouded in mystery, but Trent Reznor and Saul Williams released some numbers this week about a similar experiment. Those numbers indicate that very few people want to pay for recorded music these days.
Related:Threatened by the Internet? Music Biz Should Rock Like Librarians
Web Products
Songbird To Build Out Music Power-Browser
Songbird is a desktop music player Marshall been using lately instead of iTunes and he’s really been enjoying it. Based at core on Mozilla technology, this week the company kicked off a 6 week campaign to build the 40 most-requested Firefox extensions for Songbird. This big burst of functionality could put Songbird over the edge as a music-lover’s dream-come-true, though it’s pretty close already.
Author Uses Amazon Kindle to Beta Test New Book
In his former occupation as a programmer at Microsoft, Daniel Oran developed the “start” button for the Windows 95 taskbar. As an author about to publish his second novel, Oran continues to innovate, this time by using the recently released Amazon Kindle e-book reader to let early readers help him refine a draft of his latest book. Oran’s use of the Kindle is one of the more interesting we’ve seen, and really demonstrates the device’s read/write potential.
Related:Yahoo! PDF Ads In the Wild on Kevin Kelly’s Latest Book
RWW Network Blogs
last100
On our Digital Lifestyle blog last100, the big news this week was Sony BMG’s decision to, in part, ditch DRM and start selling tracks on Amazon MP3 without copy-protection. That makes four out of four, with Sony BMG joining the other major labels: EMI, Universal Music and Warner (as predicted in last100’s Digital Music 2007 year in review). In a follow up post, Daniel Langendorf asked where this leaves Apple’s iTunes Store?
On the Internet TV front, Netflix made a splash with its announcement of a partnership with LG to deliver movies over the Internet directly to a TV.
In their main feature-post this week titled ‘Mobile: the Year of Wireless hasnt arrived yet‘, last100’s Dan Langendorf took a hard look at the changing face of the mobile industry (particularly in the U.S.), calling 2007 part of the transition years — with much bigger changes yet to come this year and realized in 2009.
AltSearchEngines
This week on AltSearchEngines, there were two interesting sets of posts: the first was a pair of very tellingposts about vertical search engines. The message: verticals are no longer “gaining strength,” they have now arrived.
Also this week ASE investigated ChaCha – with a review of ChaCha’s mobile launch, followed by Natalya Murakhver’s interview with ChaCha CEO Scott Jones.
That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
