Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services

Today's Web has terabytes of information available to humans, but hidden from computers. It is a paradox that information is stuck inside HTML pages, formatted in esoteric ways that are difficult for machines to process. The so called Web 3.0, which is likely to be a pre-cursor of the real semantic web, is going to change this. What we mean by 'Web 3.0' is that major web sites are going to be transformed into web services - and will effectively expose their information to the world.

Foleo


As rumored, the big new device that's Palm's Jeff Hawkins has chosen to announce at the D conference today is the Palm Foleo, which the company is billing as a "mobile companion." Boasting a 10-inch widescreen display and a full-size keyboard, the device is intended to be used in conjunction with your smartphone, with any edits to documents made on one device automatically reflected on the other thanks to the device's Bluetooth connectivity.

See additional pictures of Foleo.

Mahalo is the world's first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven't yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results.

eBay confirms StumbleUpon acquisition

eBay released a statement on Wednesday afternoon confirming that, as speculated, it has acquired Web site discovery service StumbleUpon. The price, according to eBay, is approximately $75 million.

eBay's most famous acquisition is arguably Internet tele

Twitter Blog Site


A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web! Check out Twitter's blog.

Note: Twitter is Micro-blogging. Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that lets you write brief text updates (usualy less than 200 characters) about your life on the go and send them to friends and interested observers via text messaging, instant messaging, email or the web.

Schmap!!

Schmap is a leading publisher of digital travel guides for 200 destinations throughout the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The innovative technology behind Schmap Guides is also used by clients, partners and bloggers to power schmapplets – a range of fully customizable map mashups and map widgets. Founded in 2004, Schmap is privately owned and based in Carrboro, North Carolina.

Know Where? Your Phone Does

With WHERE™ GPS widgets, you drag widgets like your local weather forecast, earthquake reports, roadside assistance, local ski reports, store finders and more from the web to your handset, or discover them directly on your phone.

Full Flexible screen by Sony

On May 24, Sony unveiled what it is calling the world’s first flexible, full-color organic electroluminescent display (OLED) built on organic thin-film transistor (TFT) technology. OLEDs typically use a glass substrate, but Sony researchers developed new technology for forming organic TFT on a plastic substrate, enabling them to create a thin, lightweight and flexible full-color display. The 2.5-inch prototype display supports 16.8 million colors at a 120 x 160 pixel resolution (80 ppi, .318-mm pixel pitch), is 0.3 mm thick and weighs 1.5 grams without the driver.

According to Sony, which plans to release a new line of miniature TVs this year and is bolstering efforts to develop next-generation flat-panel OLEDs, this new technology will lead to the development of thinner, lighter and softer electronics.

The company is scheduled to present the results of its research at the SID 2007 International Symposium now underway in the US.

,

Polymer Vision: Organic based rollable displays

Polymer Vision announced its cooperation with Innos to establish the world’s first production facility for organic semiconductor based rollable displays. Manufacturing will start this year to meet the increasing commercial demand for the unique Polymer Vision display technology.

» polymervision.com / PDF download

What will Web 3.0 look like?

Just in case you missed it, the web now has version numbers. Nearly three years ago, amid continued hand-wringing over the dot-com crash, a man named Dale Dougherty dreamed up something called Web 2.0, and the idea soon took on a life of its own.

• More information regarding Web 3.0.
• Web 3.0 Q & A.
  

Wireless for the Clueless

Wireless, we keep being told, is the wave of the future. It's the next big thing. After all, the San Jose, California research firm Infonetics estimates that the market for WLAN hardware (that's equipment for wireless local-area networks) will grow to approximately $2.3 billion by 2005.

World's Thinnest Laptop

Codenamed the Intel Mobile Metro Notebook, this prototype was designed by Intel along with Ziba Design, and it's a mere .7 inches thick and weighs just 2.25 pounds. See it here.

7 Ways to Send Huge Files: 25X Bigger than Gmail

Gmail users can now send up to 20MB of attachments to each other. But we want more! Here are 7 awesome services that let you send files of more than 500MB.

One more Web 2.0 and what it means

Using the Web 2.0 write up in Wikipedia this video is to help teach educators about Web 2.0 tools.

What is Web 2.0?

What exactly does it mean? Andy Gutmans of Zend defines Web 2.0 and explains how it's changing the face of the Internet.

Yugma is a free web collaboration service that enables people to instantly connect over the internet to communicate and share content and ideas using any application or software. Whether you are on a Windows, Mac or Linux, you can connect on-demand and real-time with friends, family, clients, or employees whether they are across the city, nation or even the globe.

Diggnation

Diggnation is a weekly tech/web culture show based on the top digg.com social bookmarking news stories.

Companies Think of Clever Ways To Draw Young Talent

Justin Wong, an aerospace engineering student from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was schmoozing on Facebook.com last fall when he came across a sleek Boeing job ad.

Campaigns Tread Carefully Into Web 2.0

Presidential hopefuls starting to use blogs, social networking sites to advance their cause.

Cisco Steps Up Consumer Push

CEO Chambers is readying a souped-up set-top box as part of the networking company's deepest push yet into the living room.

Online Video Gets Real

Not all video is good video—that's why editors were created. But a good video-editing package can cost hundreds of dollars and take weeks to master. Fortunately, there's a new generation of video-sharing sites that include free video-editing tools.

Here are a few:

Eyespot beta (www.eyespot.com)
Not only does Eyespot let you upload and edit your video online, it also encourages the use of free public-domain and open-license material. To edit a video, you simply drag and drop clips into a timeline. To trim a sequence, Eyespot indicates start points with a bright-green arrow and end points with a red arrow, a method so simple it puts every other video editor to shame.

Grouper (www.grouper.com)
Notable primarily because it was purchased by Sony last summer, Grouper takes a unique approach to helping users edit their efforts. Rather than having them perform edits online through a browser application, Grouper offers a free editing program for download. Unfortunately, the Windows program leaves a lot to be desired.

Jumpcut (www.jumpcut.com)
Recently acquired by Yahoo!, Jumpcut was clearly designed with bloggers in mind. Its lucid online video-editing program is useful and trouble-free, and the site offers lots of options for getting your message online.

Motionbox (www.motionbox.com)
Taking a no-muss, no-fuss approach to editing videos, Motionbox emphasizes sharing "the good stuff." In other words, it lets people cut out the dead, dull, and dopey parts of their videos quickly online so that the audience doesn't get bored.

YouTube founders unfazed by challenges

The media's recent legal and competitive challenges to Internet video pioneer YouTube haven't fazed co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who have diligently sought to make money for new owner Google Inc., as well as the creators of the content that fuels their Web site's whirlwind growth.

Web 2.0 is led by technology geeks

Web 2.0. So what does it mean? Basically it is a new way of designing websites based on new ways of coding (like Ajax), new designing techniques that use advanced CSS and “pure” layouts (more spaces, nice logos, brand oriented) and also probably on the feeling of community.

Top Tools to build a web 2.0 app from scratch: the ultimate guide

You have a brilliant idea and want to bring it to life through a nice web 2.0 application on the web. In this guide, we suppose you already have access to a dedicated or shared server.

The Digital Incubator program, now in its second year, was developed jointly by mtvU and Cisco to discover talented college students to create new media and entertainment concepts. Together, they provide the monetary, creative and technical resources for students to bring their digital media ideas into reality…as well as a national platform for the finished products to be showcased. The Digital Incubator program wants to encourage the next generation of talent to experiment with new forms of story telling made possible because of video and broadband coming together and mtvU reaches a college audience that is consuming media in new and exciting ways. mtvU and Cisco are happy to announce our 2007 grant awards.

Build online applications by dragging and dropping


A simple, powerful new way to create web-based business applications that can be used by anyone, anytime, anywhere! Coghead is the one do-it-yourself web application platform that can handle all of your projects from beginning to end.

Amazon opens a music store

Amazon dropped the bomb today by announcing its DRM-free music store.

Digg, Reddit, Netscape: The Wisdom of Crowds or Mob Rule?

"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals" - "K," Men In Black

Welcome to Inside Silicon Valley

Welcome to a new weekly podcast from the Mercury News and PodTech.net. Each week, they’ll help you understand what makes Silicon Valley tick, with news and interviews with entrepreneurs and established tech companies.

For their first show, they visited Brickhouse, the new idea incubator that Yahoo recently opened in the trendy South Park neighborhood of San Francisco. Yahoo is hoping that this new campus will evoke a start-up vibe and spur innovation within the company. Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz explains how it will work.

Pew Research on tagging

Pew Research Center: Tagging Play is a short report looking at who tags content on sites like Flickr, YouTube, Del.Icio.Us and the others.

I’d strongly recommend reading the brief report. There are some basic demographics in the report and short piece on what tagging means.

A December 2006 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 28% of internet users — and 7% on any typical day — have tagged or categorized online content such as photos, news stories or blog posts.

Grouptivity Pulls Social Bookmarking Card



Grouptivity launched an updated version of its content-sharing tool on Monday. Blog posters can now add a "discuss this" button on the bottom of any post, which will pull up the Grouptivity sharing dialogue to send off the post or article to others. This dialogue allows you to pick from various pieces of media (photos and videos) that you want to share, along with a full text copy of the content. There's also the option to send it off to multiple e-mail addresses, set up read confirmations, and author explanatory messages to your recipients.

Firefox Does Twitter: Twitbin

Twitbin is a small Firefox extension that puts a Twitter sidebar inside your browser. Once you've logged in with your Twitter credentials, it keeps tabs on your friends or public Tweets. You can also write new posts right from the sidebar.

To toggle the Twitbin sidebar on and off, there's a bird logo that shows up on your browser next to the home button. The sidebar has its own links, for switching back and forth between friends and public feeds, and a refresh button to update posts. If you're not interested in manually hitting the refresh button, Twitbin can be set to automatically refresh all the posts every 1, 5, or 10 minutes.

To toggle Twitbin on and off, there's a handy button installed on your browser.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Twitbin is not without its snags. For example, when typing there's no character limit warning to let you know how much room is left; instead, it just cuts off once you've hit 140 characters. Likewise, the typing interface only gives you a single line, so you can't see what you've written about without scrolling back and forth.

Twitbin is free and maintains that no-cost aspect with advertisements; you'll see a small ad on the bottom of the sidebar. It's fairly unobtrusive, and in place to pay for the development team's server costs.

Compared to some of the other Twittering solutions out there, Twitbin is very similar to Tweetbar in its use and integration with Firefox. Tweetbar also works with the Flock browser. For other ways to use Twitter, check out our Newbie's guide or our post on six ways to improve Twitter.

Web 3.0 and SEO

Phil Wainewright first used the term “Web 3.0” nearly a year ago, and to date the concept has been even more difficult to pin down than Web 2.0 was when it was first coined. Already the term attracts controversy, with Wikipedia barely mentioning it except to say that there is not “sufficient consensus from the community of Web designers to justify the creation of a new term to describe the next generation of the Web.” Is it real, and what does it mean for SEO?

Wiki

What is it? A wiki is a website that allows visitors to add, remove, and edit content.
A collaborative technology for organizing information on Web sites. Wikis allow for linking among any number of pages. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for masa collaborative authoring.

One that I like is Jotspot. Below are links that provide information about Jotspot.

• Getting Started
• Watch Tutorials
• View FAQ
• Ask a Question

Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices

Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices What does Web 2.0 mean for your company?

Additional information about Web 2.0 by Tim O'Reilly.

Comparing 5 Ways to Tag Videos

There's so many videos flying around online these days and both the sheer number and impact of those videos are only going to increase with time. Video tagging tools let you archive and share favorites, subscribe to video tag feeds in iTunes or display tagged videos on a webpage using SplashCast.

Joost Announces $45 million Funding From Sequoia, Index, CBS & Viacom

Internet TV startup Joost raised $45 million in a venture round of financing, the company will announce this evening. Investors include Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, CBS Corporation, Viacom and Chinese billionaire Li Ka-shing.

The company has not previously disclosed any financings. Joost was started by Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström in 2006; presumably seed funding came directly from them.

Apple Filing reveals multi-sided iPod with Touch Screen Interface

Apple Inc. is looking to patent a design for a handheld device (or iPod) that displays its output on a small front-side display screen but receives input through a larger touch- and force-sensitive back-side interface, AppleInsider has discovered.

How to Get Started using RSS

RSS has become a valuable technology for everything from casual web users to webmasters. According to a recent Yahoo survey only 12% of internet users are aware of RSS and a mere 4% have knowingly used RSS. RSS exists as a means to gather and display information quickly and easily. By the end of this article, you should know what RSS is and how to use it to make your life easier.

Digg This

Jim Wilson for The New York Times

Kevin Rose, second from left, the founder of Digg.com, a Web site that lets users submit links to news accounts, on the set with Alex Albrecht, Jay Adelson and David Prager.