Slideshare.net

Slidecasting by SlideShare.net enables you to synchronize PowerPoint slides and audio files. To create a slidecast, you upload slides to SlideShare.net. The audio file is hosted anywhere on the web. Then you link the slides and audio by using an online synchronization tool. When you play the slidecast, the audio is streamed from its location and plays with the slides. The service is completely free.

Here’s a good example of a finished slidecast—not exactly a business example, but very cute. And here’s presentation guru Garr Reynolds using it too.

Tangler

Australian startup Tangler has created a next generation forum product that allows real-time discussions to occur without page refreshes. Their forum product is both synchronous and asynchronous - meaning it competes as much with Meebo (web based chat) as it does with existing forum applications. Users can also easily embed rich media into the discussion.

Profile Builder Launching Centralized & Portable Info Page

Profile Builder is a new tool that lets you create an online profile and provide access to it pretty much anywhere on the web.

The profiles you create with this service combine all of the pertinent info about you. There’s an about me section, a place for your blog, other sections for your photos and videos, a Jukebox music player, and a page for contact information, which unfortunately doesn’t look like it can be used as a profile aggregator. Once you’ve created your profile, you can insert your Profile Builder icon on your personal website or blog, or in existing social networks including MySpace, Flickr, Facebook and LinkedIn. Anyone that clicks on the icon will get a pop up window that displays all of your information neatly in this centralized tool.

A Wiki With Peanut Butter



A PBwiki is an easy-to-use web page that multiple people can edit. Use PBwiki to make a wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich -- free.

Dial DIR-ECT-IONS

A group of experts in the field of voice user interfaces, speech-recognition technology and navigation have banded together to create a voice-activated system, called DIR-ECT-IONS, that provides mobile phone users with driving directions and store location services via SMS/text messages

Second Life Loses Gamblers But Finds God

An Italian Catholic priest is urging the faithful use the virtual world to get in touch with reality.

Wikipedia founder plans open-source search engine

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, the world's biggest community-written online encyclopedia, announced Friday that he had taken a small step toward his next big goal: a community-programmed search engine that competes with Google.

Check out Jimmy Wales other site:

Twerq: Yet, another search engine



TWERQ is a robust tabbed search interface integrated directly into the web page. This uses less system memory and offers you the advantage of containing all searches inside one browser window or tab. You can refine and search for multiple search terms simultaneously with each set of results displaying in it's own tab. This allows you to instantly flip through each set of results and quickly identify which search term is most relevant.

Web-based Instant Messaging is Growing

Who needs downloads? Not instant-messaging fans, apparently, according to Nielsen NetRatings. The online division of the legendary statistics-crunching company just released a study that tracks the fastest-growing instant-messaging software products from August 2006 to June 2007, and the results indicate that Web-based is the way to go.

Guidelines for Avatars

IBM Corp. will publish official guidelines this week for more than 5,000 employees who inhabit Second Life and other virtual worlds where Big Blue hosts meetings with clients and partners.

Best Business Ideas In The World

Business 2.0 magazine presents its fourth annual look at great business ideas from outside the United States. (more)

Global connections

With an interactive map, you can see a country-by-country breakdown of Web usage across the globe. (more)

Where are they now?

Last year Business 2.0 identified 23 really cool Web 2.0 companies outside the United States. Here are 10 that have become hits. (more)

Podcast Spot



Podcast Spot is the best place to get conversational with podcasting! Create a podcast and share it with your friends, family, or even the world.

8 Internet TV apps in 8 weeks

From Joost, Miro, to Zattoo. Is it time to ditch your cable TV subscription?

Minisodes: Watch an hour of TV in 6 minutes

Classic TV shows normally an hour or 30 minutes are cut down to four to six minutes on the Minisode Network.

That is, who among us hasn't felt the double-edged sword of our media age: So much video from TV, DVDs, the Internet and even cell phones ... but too little time to watch it all?

The Minisode Network has a solution.

Launched in June as a broadband channel on the MySpace site, it offers, for our streaming pleasure, episodes of vintage Sony Pictures Television series like "Silver Spoons," "Starsky & Hutch," "Diff'rent Strokes" and even Ricki Lake's talk show.

But the, um, sparkling array of programs isn't what makes the Minisode Network a cultural godsend. It's the convenient packaging: each episode has been pruned from its original half-hour or hour length down to a handy running time of somewhere between four and six minutes!

Mashable

With in excess of 4.5 million monthly pageviews, Mashable is the world's largest blog on social networking.

What does that mean? It means sites like MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, hi5, Piczo, Bebo and YouTube.

If you're launching a new social network, or a tool that plugs into MySpace and the rest, Mashable wants to know!

Mashable is written by Pete Cashmore, a new media expert. It ranks among the Top 100 blogs worldwide.

Adobe AIR Gradually Graining

Adobe Systems (ADBE) has been working on an ambitious new way to view Internet content without launching a browser window, and there are encouraging signs that Web developers might latch onto it. The platform, Adobe AIR, is sort of like desktop widgets on steroids. Read more here.

(Here are a few of the apps Adobe is showcasing.)

Web Information Transit Map

Are you feeling lost in the Web 2.0 world? Are your social networking skillz a little rusty? Don't worry, the Information Architects Japan folks can help you find your way. Click on the map below to download a readable version or to view a clickable online version.

The YouTube-ification of politics: Candidates losing control

Read how YouTube has changed the face of politics, perhaps forever.

New online maps [map mashups] for homebuyers

New Web services use Google Maps to help home hunters combine stats on everything from traffic congestion to school-district budgets. Business 2.0 Magazine reports.

Apple Steve Jobs Top Powergeek

Steve Jobs was crowned the king of the online music revolution by Blender, topping a list of the 25 most influential people in Web music. "The iTunes Store and the iPod have done more to change the way people listen to music than anything since the CD, and maybe since the sound recording," Blender's editor-in-chief said. full story

When Web 2.0 Meets Information Infrastructure

Ever had that needle in a haystack feeling when looking for your own personal information or scouring for corporate data or files?

The Next Wave: Yelp

By Jeffrey M. O'Brien, Fortune senior editor

Yelp is a hot web startup with two ambitions: to have fun and to seize as much of the $100 billion local ad market as possible. (more)

The Next Small Thing

The Web Goes Wild Over Widgets

BusinessWeek writer Catherine Holahan explains what a widget is. She shows how widgets make their way across the Web and appear on users' blogs and social network pages.

The Next Small Thing

Bits of code called widgets open the door to viral marketing across social networks. Silicon Valley sees them as a Web revolution in the making

• Slide Show: The Wizards of Widgets

Living in a Widgetized World

With widgets, any page on the Web can be your point of sale. Marketers met at a conference to figure out how to spread them far and wide

Thumbstrips

ThumbStrips is a Firefox plugin that records a filmstrip of screenshots.

The plugin comes from Intuit’s Innovation Lab, an Intuit R&D unit headed by former General Manager of Quicken Roy Rosin.

ThumbStrips records a filmstrip of a users browsing session to make it easy to return to and share pages a user has visited. The plugin was developed after observing people struggling with the back button and history lists. A sharing component supports collaborative search or people doing research projects, trying to share with each other where they’ve been and what they found there.

Web 2.0 Awards-2007

SEOmoz's team reviewed hundreds of sites in the Web 2.0 sphere to uncover the best in each of 41 categories.

Another cool Web 2.0 aplication

Upload, share, print photos. Fotki.com is a service for sharing and printing your photos online. The easiest way to share photos with friends & family.

Apple iPhone...indepth



Here's an indepth review of the iPhone.

Are RSS Feeds Really Beneficial?


Here's a great article on the benefits off RSS feeds.

Social Networking Websites

Why are there all of a sudden so many social networking websites popping up like the rain drops in a rainy season. According to a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project survey more than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites.

Within a search of two minutes I found the following websites:

• Twitter
• Ryze
• MySpace
• Pownce
• Jaiku
• Orkut
• Facebook

This WikiPedia link has a massive list of social networking websites.

All these websites provide business and social networking and interaction tools. And if you believe the trend, many of these websites are great hits among the young as well as the professionals. Amazingly, some of them are outright silly. Take for instance Twitter. It beats logic why people would even visit the website, leave alone use it for leaving ultra-boring messages. An average MySpace page is so gross to look at.

Some SEO experts are already suggesting you to invest your time on these websites to generate quality traffic to your websites and blogs? But is it really worth it? Depends on what sort of traffic you want and how much spare time you have got. If you are a big company or a rich entrepreneur, sure you can hire someone to interact on these websites on your behalf because extra traffic doesn’t harm (if you can bear the bandwidth cost). But if are a one-man-woman team then every minute you spend promoting your service is precious. Maintaining social networking website can easily turn out to be a time consuming affair.

But Social Networking Websites are not useless

Social networking websites, if used correctly, can definitely help you build brand awareness and create the right buzz for your service or product, especially for services and products that would appeal to the frequenters of these websites. The power of social media websites lies in the massive amount of traffic they generate. Currently numerous films and other entertainment programs are being promoted through various social media websites.

Road Warriors Web 2.0

For those who are looking for ways to never overpay for a flight again, try out these services:

Farecast.com is the first airfare prediction website. They help online travel shoppers save money by answering the question; should you buy now or wait? Farecast now offer airfare predictions from over 75 U.S. departure cities to top domestic destinations.

This site focuses on building new product features that will help travel shoppers make more confident and smarter airfare purchase decisions.

FareCompare.com wants to improve the current shopping process by providing relevant information to consumers in a timely fashion.

They receive and process fares directly from the airlines. Each fare shown is a valid fare on that airline. Unfortunately, sometimes inventory (seats) is limited/unavailable for the selected fare on your selected dates. On average each airline files from 10-20 fares between any two cities.

Yapta's purpose is to make it easy for you to secure the best airfare deals available on the Web. They do this by giving you a tool to "tag" the trips you like while shopping online, then Yapta tracks prices on these trips and alerts you when prices drop. Yapta also gives you a single place to keep all of your trips online. It's a pretty simple concept, but for some reason, no one has done this before.

Web 2.0 Applications

Here are a few popular Web 2.0 applications. Not to worry, I'll bring you more later on.


Allmydata
Allmydata harnesses the power of grid storage technology to securely store your email, photos, music, movies and more.

Backpack
Make a page out of an idea. Then add free-form text, to-dos, notes, photos, files. Share pages with other people. Set email and mobile phone reminders so you don't forget.

BlinkList
Import and manage Your Bookmarks - in the Blink of an Eye. Create Watch lists to See What Your Friends Are Discovering Online. Follow the Wisdom of Crowds and Discover What's Hot Now.

clipmarks
Clip and save just the stuff you want from any web page. Create your personal online collection of clipmarks. Tag them with keywords, add your own comments and share them with friends. Search the Public Clipmarks to see what's being clipped and who is clipping it.

Kiko
Slow, featureless online calendars are so Web 1.0. Kiko is a cool new web calendar that delivers all the functionality of desktop calendar software, and all the convenience of online access. And it's free!

Second Life Copyright Infringement Clam Heads To Court

A case of alleged copyright infringement in Second Life is heading to court.

According to Reuters, Second Life entrepreneur Kevin Alderman, the owner of Eros LLC, a company that makes virtual sex beds, filed the “Eros LLC vs John Doe” lawsuit on Tuesday.

Second Life user Volkov Catteneo is alleged to have copied and distributed the “SexGen Bed”, an item that sells for L$12,000 ($45.11). The lawsuit seeks to force Linden Lab to disclose Catteneo’s real-world identity, as well as asking Catteneo for damages.

The case, the first of its kind for Second Life, will be interesting from a legal perspective. There is no legal precedent for the case, and as Stanford University’s Lauren Gelman said in a Four Corners report earlier this year, the concept of virtual property ownership is vexed:

“All of this is virtual bits and bytes, ones and zeros that are sitting on the servers at Second Life’s headquarters and the server farms they have around the world…how much can you own something that’s really under the control and domain of another party, this is really where the law is being tested to see how they’re going to figure that out.”

On the surface it also seems a little strange that Linden Lab has not already dealt with it; Second Life has strict rules in relation to copyright infringement and has previously acted in favor of in-world copyright owners.

Trendmill: Clothes Darling, Clothes!

Keeping with this weeks evolving theme of niche social networking sites comes Trendmill, a social networking destination for lovers of clothes.

Trendmill allows users to upload images of their own clothes or clothes they wish they owned. Members are able to “tip people off” on what they think is hot, vote on other people’s clothes and collaboratively “give a general sense of what the next big trend in fashion is going to be”.
Trendmill also provides the usual features expected from a social networking site, including messaging, publishing articles (blogging) and connecting with friends (”entourage”).

TrendMill competes in the same space as StyleDiary, ShareYourLook and ShoutFit . Unlike some competitors, TrendMill is strictly a social networking play and it shows through a stylish interface and a haute couture of user sites. Clothes may make the man but they won’t on many reading this, so it is a site that’s not for everyone. However if you take your Versace and YSL seriously, you will probably like Trendmill.

NBBC Joins The Deadpool

NBBC, a video aggregation service launched by NBC last September has joined the TechCrunch Deadpool.

The remains of NBBC will be merged into the NBC/ News Corp joint venture first announced in March.

The new service, dubbed Clown Co has long been discussed but to date is yet to appear. Strangely, News Corp recently launched , a YouTube competitor in its own right that will compete directly with the NBC/ News Corp joint venture.

In an interview with MediaPost, George Kliavkoff, NBCU’s chief digital officer justified the closure of NBBC as a step towards strengthening the NBC/ News Corp joint venture : “we saw that “NewSite” could use NBBC’s resources, so last Friday afternoon we agreed to contribute it to the NewSite effort.”

The closure of NBBC and the transfer of IP and talent does not extend to existing agreements. Over 150 partners of NBBC, including Hearst, A&E Television Networks, The Horror Channel, Vibe Media Group, CNET Networks and Forbes.com will be required to negotiate new contracts with the new service.

CNN gives it's website a face lift and a new improved Technology site

Tech-head nation

Technology is all around us all the time and we crave even more gotta-have-it gadgets.

iPhone blog

Go to CNET's blog site devoted to the iPhone. There you can stay up to date on the newest applications that you can download.

Firefox 3 Alpha 6 now available

Mozilla has released the sixth alpha of Gran Paradiso, Firefox 3 development name. This release comes with a very short delay to the original schedule which is an important achievement considering Alpha 5 was delayed for about a week.

Is IBM Making Enterprise Mashups Respectable?

Here's a great article on how IBM is embracing the use of mainstreaming mashups and Web 2.0 technologies.

Mobio Launches New Mobile Social Media Widgets

Mobio Networks announced today that are launching new mobile social media widgets for Web 2.0 services Twitter, Digg and Kaboodle as part of their GetMobio lifestyle portal. Mobio has created 50+ mashups that help people stay connected with friends, places and information while mobile.

25 New Apps for Your iPhone

<So you took the plunge this weekend and snapped up an iPhone. You lucky BizHacker! Now it’s time to see what she can do. Web-2.0 blog Rev2.org has assembled the top 25 Web apps for the iPhone. Not all of them will improve your productivity, but the list definitely includes some worthwhile tools.

Nine Cool Things You Can Do With Wikipedia

Wikipedia is great encyclopedia, but did you know you could also use it as a future planner, TV guide, zeitgeist trend tracker, and more?