Wikirage Does Live Zeitgiest For Wikipedia

If you're a fan of Google's zeitgeists, or whenever Wikipedia publishes their list of the most popular pages, you'll get a kick out of Wikirage. The service scours the latest edits on Wikipedia to find out which items are getting the most editing attention. It then publishes the list in a top 100, which you can browse by hour, day, week, and month. Each link goes straight to the Wikipedia page in question, and offers a pretty fascinating look at what's going on inside the service.

Touchgraph Shows Connectivity Between Websites

The TouchGraph Google Browser shows connectivity between websites in a visual fashion.

The service pulls in data from Google’s database of related sites, delivering an interactive visual map of interconnected websites or search terms.

TouchGraph also offers Amazon and Facebook browsers as well as providing the visualization technology to companies on a per job basis.

Yahoo To KickStart Social Networking Efforts

Yahoo is reported to be working on a new social networking service that matches college students to employers.

Yahoo Kickstart give users profile pages which are focused on the user’s resume, LinkedIn style, as opposed to a Facebook or MySpace profile. Corporations and wannabe employers are then provided with groups that users can join, but with a catch: to join a group you need an invite via a former student who works at that company.

Microsoft Looking for it's iPhone

With continued rumors of Microsoft possibly buying out Research In Motion, the company that makes BlackBerries, the company’s stock price has reached an all-time high of $85.Micro

Web 2.0 Summit: October 17-19, 2007; San Francisco, CA

Only the Web 2.0 Summit (formerly named Web 2.0 Conference) brings the intelligence, innovation, and leadership of the Internet industry together in one place at one time. The Summit is known for its interactive format, stressing audience interaction and participation.

Eight Best (Or Most Interesting) Web 2.0 Definitions and Explanations

Why does Web 2.0 – a complex, subtle, yet practical topic – need so much explanation? That question was addressed by social computing and Web 2.0 expert Dion Hinchcliffe in an end-of-year round up that he compiled all the way back in December 2005. To this day it makes a very handy starting-point for anyone seeking to get themselves up to speed.

Eurekster is a pioneer and leader in Social Search and Vertical Search technologies that harness the knowledge and behavior of online communities to increase search relevance and value for site visitors, site publishers and advertisers. Eurekster created the Swicki platform which allows web publishers to build community-driven social search engines, called "swickis" that aggregate information on particular topics from any site of their choice for use on their websites.

ProfileBuilder: Manage Your Profile, Not Accounts

With a plethora of social networks for everyone from knitters to dog lovers, managing our increasing number of long tail profiles is a huge pain. The problem of managing a fragmented identity has been attacked two ways: creating a new master account (OpenID), aggregating identity through search (Spock, Wink), or aggregating management of all your accounts on one site.

ProfileBuilder link

The Next Email

Why Twitter will change the way business communicates (again).

France Telecom confirms talks with Apple on iPhone

France Telecom confirmed on Friday that it is in talks with Apple Inc over marketing the latter's iPhone but said there is no deal yet.

France's Jooce Enters WebOS Space

Jooce is a Flash-based web operating system and sharing platform. They are targeting the millions of people who use "cybercafes" to conduct their Internet affairs instead of a regular desktop or laptop. The Jooce product is aiming to provide these virtual vagabonds with a web-based desktop to manage their IM, email, storage, media and widgets in a secure and protected way. They also provide virtual nomads with an online desktop that they can share with friends to swap files like pictures, documents, audio and video.

The Times of Your Life


Never forget another special memory. circaVie allows you to easily create multimedia timelines all about your life. Special events, noteworthy achievements, relationships, memorable vacations, interests and hobbies, celebrations, announcements … you name it. If it’s about life, it’s circaVie.

Web 2.0 for Moms and Dads

Websites that cater to families tend to be very community-oriented, and deliberately family-friendly without being overly "girly" (which can be a problem for dad-oriented sites). Care is made to ensure a positive experience for the user, and not just in using the app or website, but also in interacting with other people who use the same tools.

Watch It When You Want

The age of TV-on-demand is finally dawning in Australia as new digital recording technologies hand unprecedented levels of control back to viewers.

New Video Chat Channel

TokBox is a new site that allows you to set up a video chat channel in seconds. The controls are simple - set volume, mute or kill camera. If the person is not there, you can leave a video message. That’s all there is to it

Box

Box.net was originally founded in 2005 as a college business project with a vision of connecting people, devices and networks. Launched officially in March of 2006, Box.net currently provides secure online file storage and sharing functionality to over 900,000 registered users, serving files to millions of people around the world. Box.net's unique platform allows personal and commercial content to be accessible, sharable, and storable in any format from anywhere. Box.net is currently based in Palo Alto, CA.

Fring

Israeli-based VOIP start-up Fring has closed an estimated $12 million second round, led by US VC fund North Bridge Venture Partners. VenFin and previous investors Pitango, Veritas and Yossi Vardi also participated. If the investment estimate is accurate, it would be one of the larger rounds for a VOIP company.

Fring is a mobile application for Windows and Symbian phones that uses VOIP to make cheap/free mobile calls and instant message. Unlike Jajah, but like Truphone, Fring sends calls and chats over Wi-Fi internet access or your 3G or GPRS Internet data plan. Like Skype, users are charged a nominal fee to call standard phone lines. However, calls made to other internet phones are free. Fring connects to standard phones, other SIP based VOIP clients, and chat applications (Skype, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Google Talk, and even Twitter).

Scrybe Closes Series A

Scrybe, the online/offline calendar and organizer, has closed their series A round of financing from Adobe Systems Incorporated and LMKR.

Scrybe is a Flash-based organizational and productivity tool that works both online and offline. It consists of multiple calendar management, to do lists, web clip bookmarklet, contact list (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or Outlook importing), and the system operates offline by caching your changes and then uploading when the system reconnects. Zimbra and Google Gears provide similar online/offline products.

The driving principle behind the application is usability. Scrybe’s main selling point is that the application retains the context of the data that you’re working with by “zooming” instead of flipping to the data. One example is the calendar. The cells of the calendar expand and contract as you edit a week, day, or hour more closely while still showing the details of the surrounding days. See the extended video below for more details.

Amie Street Closes Series A Financing Led By Amazon.com

Social music marketplace Amie Street has closed a Series A round of financing led by Amazon.com, along with some new partnerships and a site redesign. The amount of Amazon’s investment and the terms are not disclosed.

Overview:

AmieStreet is a music download service, where any artist can upload their music for download. Users then go to the site and purchase songs, with the starting price set at free. When downloads pick up, the price starts to rise, all the way up to $0.98. If a song gets to $0.30 or so, you know it’s popular. Artists keep 70% of revenues as long as they have made at least $10. Additionally, artists are not required to sell their music exclusively through Amie Street and can remove it at any time.

On the user end, users can search, browse and listen to music for free (via streaming). Users who have purchased a song can recommend it to their friends using a limited number of RECs that they’ve received (users get one per dollar they add to their account). Once recommended, users will get account credit if the price of the song increases, giving them an incentive to find and recommend good music.

Sun Extends UltraSparc Reach

Sun Microsystems is getting into the business of selling microprocessors--again.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company plans to announce its new UltraSparc T2 microprocessor, along with plans for servers based on the chip. Sun plans to insert the UltraSparc T2, an eight-core, 64-thread microprocessor, into servers that will hit the market in the second half of the year.

The Slideshow Is Dead

An email arrived yesterday from the guys at Animoto proclaiming that their application, which launches to the public on August 14th, would lead to the "end of slideshows." Those are rather sensational words, but after taking a look at their app, they might just be right -- at least in terms of what's hot among the social networking set. Read the article here.

Facebook How To

What is Facebook and why should you use it?

Open standards may let social networks, virtual worlds intersect

The millions of people who use social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace and the millions who stalk the streets of virtual worlds like Second Life inhabit what are essentially two different neighborhoods in cyberspace.

Free Phone Calls...for Life?

Tech media and blogs were buzzing recently over the launch of ooma, a Palo Alto start-up that’s promising free phone calling, once you buy the $400 ooma box. In this interview with the Mercury News, CEO Andrew Frame explains how ooma works. And he answers questions about the cost of the box (they actually could have charged more, he says), the state of the Internet calling industry, ooma’s security and whether now is the right time to be launching a landline phone service. Frame also takes us on a tour of the start-up’s Palo Alto offices, where engineers design and work on the company’s devices.

Download MP4

Orbious is a privately held software company founded in Australia in early 2006 to develop innovative products based on natural language processing. In late 2006, Orbious identified document disclosure as a possible growth market and significant Research and Development was conducted to investigate alternative software based approaches to this problem. The resultant software, DocTracker, was completed earlier this month and beta testing has subsequently begun. As a result of our Research and Development, we have begun working on related software applications focusing around Copyright Infringement.

Turn Your Phone Into a GPS



Are you lost and need to find where you are and how to get to your destination?
You don't have a map? If you have a cell phone, then you're in luck. Read on road warrior.

Here's the buzz on Buzzword

Word processing in the browser has always been "convenient," but rarely has it been called "full-featured," or even "beautiful."

But the web apps status quo is set to change with the arrival of Buzzword, an office-caliber document editor with a visually rich user interface. Buzzword beats current Ajax-based offerings like Google Docs and Zoho Writer in both usability and aesthetic impact. And in a few months, when a desktop version is released, Buzzword will pose a serious challenge to Microsoft Word, the current king of document editing on the desktop. Read the rest of the article here.

Check out the demo below via YouTube

Comscore's Latest Numbers: Worldwide Social-Networking Growth

Statistics house ComScore released some numbers on Tuesday pertaining to how quickly a handful of popular social-networking sites are growing worldwide, and which ones dominate in which regions of the globe.

Moblog

Moblog is a blend of the wordsmobile and weblog. A mobile weblog, or Moblog, consists of content posted to the Internet from a mobile or portable device, such as a cellular phone or PDA. Moblogs generally involve technology which allows publishing from a mobile device.

Living With Technology: Web 2.0 design

Web 2.0 design means "cliche" to many. Designers aching to fit into the current aesthetic are overusing rounded corners and pastel colors on new sites. But at its core, Web 2.0 design is about building services that are clean, simple, fast, and interactive. Designers who get this are making sites that are leagues ahead of those from the previous generation.

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.