nptech.info

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/iphone_os_4_logo_apr10.jpg"Apple a href="http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/09/08/apple_release_ios_4_1_with_bluetooth_proximity_sensor_fixes.html"has released/a the latest version of its operating system for the iPhone and iPod Touch, a href="http://www.apple.com/iphone/software-update/"iOS 4.1/a today. The update was a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/live_blog_apples_fall_event.php"announced/a last week at Apple's fall event and brings a number of new features and bug fixes./p pWhile the latest version of iOS offers some nifty features like HDR photos and Apple's brand new Game Center, those behind the latest jailbreaks a href="http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/1086032828/its-a-trap"warn/a that updating will cause you to lose your jailbreak./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21710amp;cb=21710' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21710amp;n=21710' border='0' alt='' //a/p pFor those of you with a standard, non-jailbroken phone, update away. The new iOS fixes the proximity sensor bug, which allowed touchscreen input when you were talking on your phone, as well as Bluetooth connectivity issues. It also takes care of iPhone 3G users that updated to iOS 4.0 and a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/apple_investigating_issues_with_ios_4_on_iphone_3g.php"found their phones suddenly unusably slow/a./p pAs for a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/apple_event_announcements_rundown_ios_41_new_ipods.php"new features/a, iOS 4.1 introduces HDR, or "high dynamic range" photos, a new a href="http://www.apple.com/game-center/"Game Center/a, the ability to upload HD video of WiFi, and TV show downloads directly from the phone. /p pThat said, those features may not be enough for some of you to give up your jailbroken iPhones. The iPhone Dev-Team has a href="http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/1013332740/winning-moves"previously noted/a that it will not be offering a jailbreak for versions after iOS 4.0.1 and today, it calls the latest update a href="http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/1013332740/winning-moves"a trap/a. According to the Dev-Team blog, beyond losing your jailbreak, the latest update also includes a baseband update. "There's currently no way to revert your baseband", they write, warning that "if you update your baseband you'll lose the ultrasn0w unlock, possibly forever."/p pFor those of you on the right side of Apple's warranty considerations, the update is available within iTunes and should be immediately available the next time you sync your phone. /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/apple_releases_ios_41_dev-team_warns_against_updat.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ZV54o3UISMpbopadXq8-_LL8Uf0/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ZV54o3UISMpbopadXq8-_LL8Uf0/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ZV54o3UISMpbopadXq8-_LL8Uf0/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ZV54o3UISMpbopadXq8-_LL8Uf0/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=VNB2qS3Vx84:1caxaE3HNTw:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=VNB2qS3Vx84:1caxaE3HNTw:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=VNB2qS3Vx84:1caxaE3HNTw:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=VNB2qS3Vx84:1caxaE3HNTw:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=VNB2qS3Vx84:1caxaE3HNTw:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=VNB2qS3Vx84:1caxaE3HNTw:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=VNB2qS3Vx84:1caxaE3HNTw:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=VNB2qS3Vx84:1caxaE3HNTw:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=VNB2qS3Vx84:1caxaE3HNTw:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=VNB2qS3Vx84:1caxaE3HNTw:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=VNB2qS3Vx84:1caxaE3HNTw:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/VNB2qS3Vx84" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/rockyou-hacker.jpg"Chances are, if you use the Internet, you are going to get hacked - it's that simple. The New York Times a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/business/05digi.html?_r=1"told us/a yesterday that even a strong password may not protect us and now, today, a href="http://cybercrime.newslinevine.com/"a study/a by security software maker Norton tells us that cybercrime is prevalent, with a majority of Internet users both worldwide and in the U.S. falling victim./p pOf course, Norton says that the obvious solution to this epidemic of crime is to use up-to-date security software (such as a hre="http://www.symantec.com/index.jsp"its own/a anti-virus and security suite), but the study also goes beyond self-promotion to look at our emotional reactions to hacking, getting hacked and who's at fault in the end./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21707amp;cb=21707' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21707amp;n=21707' border='0' alt='' //a/p pAccording to the report, nearly two-thirds of Internet users globally and almost three-quarters in the U.S. have fallen victim to cybercrime, with even worse numbers in China, where 83% of Internet users have been hacked. The report found that 58% of respondents felt angry, 51% annoyed, and 80% expected that those responsible would not be found or "brought to justice." Only 3% of those surveyed said they didn't think it would happen to them - so getting hacked is not only something we've come to expect, but, as Norton's Internet safety advocate Marian Merritt told a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/090810-symantec-most-hacking-victims-blame.html?hpg1=bn"Network World/a, something we blame ourselves for./p p"People do feel angry, but we also found that people feel pretty guilty," said Merritt, noting that 54% of respondents said they "should have been more careful" when they responded to online scams. Twelve percent said that getting hacked was entirely their fault./p pAccording to a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/business/05digi.html?_r=1"The Times/a, some of the fault lays at the feet of the security community and those sites that are most often targets, such as online commerce sites like Paypal and Amazon. One a href="http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/132623/WhereDoSecurityPoliciesComeFrom.pdf"report (PDF)/a cited in the article found that many "busy commercial destinations" such as these "allowed relatively weak passwords," while other sites required a maze of password requirements that also compromised security. /p pBeyond all of this, as ReadWriteWeb's Adrianne Jeffries a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/password_security_and_universal_logins.php"suggested the other day/a, a solution beyond antivirus and long, overcomplicated passwords might be the use of systems like OpenID./p pFor a quick look at Norton's finding, the a href="http://cybercrime.newslinevine.com/norton_cybercrime_report.pdf "fact sheet (PDF)/a offers a glimpse of stats both in the U.S. and worldwide. The report is released concurrent with today's release of Norton Internet Security 2011. /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/three_quarters_of_us_internet_users_fall_victim_to.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/D4hDBDbcX7ES2KiaGTaVPpyrMXU/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/D4hDBDbcX7ES2KiaGTaVPpyrMXU/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/D4hDBDbcX7ES2KiaGTaVPpyrMXU/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/D4hDBDbcX7ES2KiaGTaVPpyrMXU/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=iJxs4xRLVcw:b5pvnweG12c:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=iJxs4xRLVcw:b5pvnweG12c:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=iJxs4xRLVcw:b5pvnweG12c:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=iJxs4xRLVcw:b5pvnweG12c:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=iJxs4xRLVcw:b5pvnweG12c:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=iJxs4xRLVcw:b5pvnweG12c:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=iJxs4xRLVcw:b5pvnweG12c:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=iJxs4xRLVcw:b5pvnweG12c:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=iJxs4xRLVcw:b5pvnweG12c:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=iJxs4xRLVcw:b5pvnweG12c:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=iJxs4xRLVcw:b5pvnweG12c:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/iJxs4xRLVcw" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="line_graph_0910.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/line_graph_0910.jpg" width="100" height="74" /Logging statistics is a two-stage process. First, you need to collect the information and store it. Next, you need to expose this information to end users./p pIt's quite simple to display a table of stats for users to look at, and this is a good option if you need to provide a detailed breakdown. But for analysing large datasets or simply providing an overview of recent activity on a site, a graph may be a better approach./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21650amp;cb=21650' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21650amp;n=21650' border='0' alt='' //a/p h2Flot: a JavaScript Plotting Library for jQuery/h2 pFor this example we'll be using Flot, a jQuery library. To get started you'll need to download a href="http://jquery.com/"jQuery/a and a href="http://code.google.com/p/flot/"Flot/a. Once you've included them in the page header, here's how you can get a simple line graph to show up./p h2Preparing the Data/h2 pBefore displaying the graph, you'll need to load up the following data:/p ol liThe values you wish to display in the graph - in this case, we'll be looking at pageviews recorded in the last 31 days for a specific blog./li liThe maximum value in the group./li /ol pAs Flot is a plotting library, you need to think of the coordinates to add each point to the graph. For instance, on the first day the blog recorded 157 pageviews, so you need to plot a coordinate: 0, 157. On the second day, the blog recorded 187 pageviews, so the coordinate for that day would be: 1, 187./p pBasically, the end result is a list of values provided in the following format:/p pre[0, 157], [1, 187]/pre pAnd so on. We can then use the value list in the next section./p h2Displaying the Graph/h2 pFirst, you need to use the following HTML:/p script src="http://gist.github.com/566127.js?file=gistfile1.html"/script pChange the height and width if you wish. Next, you need the following JavaScript:/p script src="http://gist.github.com/566129.js?file=gistfile1.js"/script pEnsure you replace emINSERT_VALUE_LIST_HERE/em and emINSERT_MAX_VALUE_HERE/em with the appropriate variables./p h2A Working Example/h2 pYou can see a real example of the Flot graph on the a href="http://www.cmfads.com/public/site/1"profile page/a of the blog in question./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2010/09/hack-of-the-day-using-flot-to.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/FNWnVecFGZyBG5shMBDNww69F7k/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/FNWnVecFGZyBG5shMBDNww69F7k/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/FNWnVecFGZyBG5shMBDNww69F7k/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/FNWnVecFGZyBG5shMBDNww69F7k/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=IeC2d7e2gF0:gNK8lyDYfQM:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=IeC2d7e2gF0:gNK8lyDYfQM:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=IeC2d7e2gF0:gNK8lyDYfQM:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=IeC2d7e2gF0:gNK8lyDYfQM:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=IeC2d7e2gF0:gNK8lyDYfQM:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=IeC2d7e2gF0:gNK8lyDYfQM:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=IeC2d7e2gF0:gNK8lyDYfQM:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=IeC2d7e2gF0:gNK8lyDYfQM:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=IeC2d7e2gF0:gNK8lyDYfQM:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=IeC2d7e2gF0:gNK8lyDYfQM:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=IeC2d7e2gF0:gNK8lyDYfQM:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/IeC2d7e2gF0" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="Shadow IT" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/images/shadow_it_0910.jpg" width="150" height="99" / The read/write enterprise isn't just about using social media in the enterprise - increasingly, it's about employees actively choosing the technologies they use to get their jobs done instead of relying on decrees from on high about what sorts of technology to use. The term "a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_IT"Shadow IT/a" refers to "IT systems and IT solutions built and used inside organizations without organizational approval." In the past few years, it's gone from being cosidered a a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/05/is-it-showing-its-own-insecuri.php"problem/a to being consider something to be a href="http://www.capgemini.com/ctoblog/2010/07/enabling_shadow_it_v_shredding.php"embraced/a and learned from. Thanks to SaaS, entire companies have been built on Shadow IT decisions./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21637amp;cb=21637' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21637amp;n=21637' border='0' alt='' //a/p pa href="http://salesforce.com"Salesforce.com/a got its start selling to sales departments who needed a solution that IT wasn't having success providing. Now its a major player in enterprise. Here are five companies that are thriving in the shadows at enterprises large and small./p h2Yammer/h2 pa href="http://yammer.com"Yammer/a announced a href="http://blog.yammer.com/blog/2010/09/announcing-the-launch-of-the-yammer-platform.html"last week/a that it's expanding from its narrow focus on microblogging into general enterprise social networking. That will bring the company into even deeper competition with established players like a href="http://microsoft.com"Microsoft/a, a href="http://sap.com"SAP/a, Salesforce.com and a href="http://jivesoftware.com"Jive/a./p pDavid Sacks, CEO of Yammer, talked up the technology behind Yammer in a phone interview, but we think the company's real differentiator is its freemium business model. Employees are signing up to use Yammer independent of IT and management, and that lets end users try the product before a purchasing decision is made./p p"The freemium model is absolutely key to what we're doing," says Sacks. "When employees are given a choice of what to use, they are going to choose the product that is easiest to use, not necessarily the company that has the biggest sales team. We're not afraid to let customers use the software first."/p pSacks is quick to point out that the company does work closely with IT once a company develops an interest in Yammer. "IT is usually the buyer, we do spend a lot of time with IT making sure they're comfortable with the security and so on, but it's employees that are driving it."/p h2Huddle/h2 pa href="http://www.huddle.net/"Huddle/a, a SaaS project management and document collaboration solution (see our previous a href=""coverage/a), has landed large enterprise customers like a href="http://www.pg.com/en_US/index.shtml"Proctor and Gamble/a through shadow IT. "We generally don't sell directly to IT," says Huddle co-founder Andy McLoughlin. Instead, Huddle will sell directly to business users unsatisfied with what their IT department are offering them. "IT generally gives these companies or organizations some big system like Sharepoint that is too complex or not flexible enough for their needs." /p pAnother driving factor, McLoughlin notes is the need for external collaboration. Increasingly, employees are finding a need to work with people outside of their own companies and internally facing tools aren't adequate for their needs./p pMcLoughlin says that although Huddle has occasionally been blocked because it's been mistaken for a file sharing service or social network, the company hasn't had much trouble with IT. "Push back has been decreasing over the past two or three years," he says. He notes Proctor and Gamble has a policy of allowing its employees to use whatever tools they need to get their jobs done./p h2SurveyMonkey/h2 pa href="http://surveymonkey.com"SurveyMonkey/a has proven that simple, single use tools can be extremely successful in the enterprise. SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg told us the company has 100% of the Fortune 100 and over 95 percent of the Fortune 500 as customers, but all of them signed up individually. "We don't do group sales or work with purchasing or IT departments- we don't have any sales people. So for us, this isn't a trend, it is our whole business."/p h2UserVoice/h2/ pWe mentioned in a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2010/09/3-trends-in-idea-management.php"our article on trends in idea management/a that a href="http://uservoice.com/"UserVoice/a CEO Richard Whitemore has been seeing more enterprises using UserVoice as an internal tool instead of an externally facing one. Whitemore says this has been driven by largely by Shadow IT - business units are frequently unhappy with the larger idea management packages installed by IT or included as part of another system, and just want to quickly gather ideas from staff./p h2Google/h2 pa href=""Forrester/a has a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2010/07/google-enterprise-developers-opensource.php"described/a information workers as Google's "trojan horse" into the a href="39% have used online productivity tools such as Google Docs"enterprise/a, noting 39% have used tools such as Google Docs in the workplace. Google Apps adoption will likely be driven not by IT management, but by the rank and file who will want to use familiar technologies like Gmail and Google Docs./p pemPhoto by a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/hamedparham/3328144733/"/abr / Hamed Parham/em/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2010/09/shadow-it.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/v0Qj6hk_MHmlyGqTgAqWPskrm4E/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/v0Qj6hk_MHmlyGqTgAqWPskrm4E/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/v0Qj6hk_MHmlyGqTgAqWPskrm4E/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/v0Qj6hk_MHmlyGqTgAqWPskrm4E/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=6WaHuBAiaf0:Qjrr-ae4kmQ:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=6WaHuBAiaf0:Qjrr-ae4kmQ:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=6WaHuBAiaf0:Qjrr-ae4kmQ:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=6WaHuBAiaf0:Qjrr-ae4kmQ:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=6WaHuBAiaf0:Qjrr-ae4kmQ:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=6WaHuBAiaf0:Qjrr-ae4kmQ:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=6WaHuBAiaf0:Qjrr-ae4kmQ:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=6WaHuBAiaf0:Qjrr-ae4kmQ:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=6WaHuBAiaf0:Qjrr-ae4kmQ:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=6WaHuBAiaf0:Qjrr-ae4kmQ:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=6WaHuBAiaf0:Qjrr-ae4kmQ:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/6WaHuBAiaf0" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="google_search_even_live_logo.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/google_search_even_live_logo.jpg" width="150" height="108" class="mt-image-none" style="" /a href="http://www.google.com"Google/a is holding a big search event at the a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=qamp;source=s_qamp;hl=enamp;geocode=amp;q=151+3rd+Street,+San+Francisco,+CAamp;sll=37.785757,-122.400982amp;sspn=0.022046,0.011415amp;ie=UTF8amp;hq=amp;hnear=151+3rd+St,+San+Francisco,+California+94105amp;ll=37.785724,-122.400742amp;spn=0.022046,0.011415amp;z=16"San Francisco MOMA/a this morning. The company has not released any specific information about the content of today's announcements, but the recent doodles on Google's homepage and various Twitter a href="http://twitter.com/ericschmidt/status/23920548950"messages/a from the official Google accounts point towards a faster search experience, possibly with streaming, as-you-type search results. We assume that this will be the core of today's announcements, but there will surely be a few surprises as well./p pThe event is scheduled to start at strong9:30am PT/12:30pm ET/strong. You can find our live blog below./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21704amp;cb=21704' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21704amp;n=21704' border='0' alt='' //a/p pGoogle's VP for search products and user experience Marissa Mayer will speak at today's event. Other speakers include Johanna Wright (director of product management), Ben Gomes (distinguished engineer) and Othar Hansson (senior software engineer)./p h2Live Blog/h2 pimg alt="google_live_video_capture.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/google_live_video_capture.jpg" width="200" height="63" class="alignright" style="" /b9:15 AM:/b The live video stream on YouTube is now availablea href="http://www.youtube.com/google" here/a./p pb9:21 AM:/b We are seeing a href="http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/09/try-google-streaming-search.html"some reports /athat you can already try Google's instant search by going to this URL: a href="http://www.google.com/webhp?sclient=psy"http://www.google.com/webhp?sclient=psy/a/p img alt="google_instant_1.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/google_instant_1.jpg" width="610" height="144" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pb9:32 AM:/b Still waiting for the event to start. Until then, you can read the a href="http://www.google.com/instant/#utm_campaign=launchutm_medium=etutm_source=rpp"FAQ for Instant Search here/a. According to Google, Instant search can "save 2-5 seconds per search." /p pb9:35 AM:/b Here we go. Google PR spokesperson Gabriel Stricker on stage, taking care of housekeeping items (WiFi, etc.). /p img alt="opening.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/opening.png" width="610" height="340" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pb9:37 AM:/b Why are we here? "State of the Union." Give everybody a sense of "where we are and where we are going." /p pb9:38 AM:/b "Today, we are going to talk a lot about speed."/p pb9:38 AM:/b "What we do is part art and part science." /p pb9:39 AM:/b Marissa Mayer takes over. /p img alt="onebillion.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/onebillion.png" width="610" height="341" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pGoogle now has over 1 billion users on its sites every week. Rolled out hundreds of search enhancements in 2010. "This stands to be the best year ever for Google Search."/p pb9:40 AM:/b Recap of new search features released so far this year: real-time, Caffeine, timeline views, better spelling correction, integration of Google Squared results. /p pb9:42 AM:/b Also: stars in search. "Users really want to bookmark results." /p pb9:43 AM:/b "We also had some fun." Recaps Google TV commercials. Plays video of Super Bowl commercial. /p pb9:45 AM:/b Yesterday's doodles: "We also had some fun with our logos." "We want search to be fun, fast and interactive." /p pb9:45 AM:/b Today's announcement: a fundamental shift in search. /p img alt="goog_telephone.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/goog_telephone.png" class="mt-image-none" style="" / p"How did we get here?" "Many years ago, if you wanted to get all the trivia about a painting in the MOMA, you would've had to spent a day in the library." By 1950, the telephone allowed you to call the librarian. 1995: CD-ROM-based encyclopedia. "But that was static information."/p pb9:47 AM:/b Today: real-time information. See if a painting is on tour, for example. /p img alt="goog_timeline.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/goog_timeline.png" width="610" height="341" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pWhere is time spent on search today? "We have made our algorithms very efficient." Helping people to understand network time and rendering time in the browser." pA search takes 24 seconds. Entering a query nine seconds. Selecting result 15 second./p pb9:50 AM:/b To speed things up, we have to bring the time spent entering a query down. /p h2Google Instant/h2 pb9:51 AM:/b Google Instant streams results as you type (pretty much what we expected). /p pDemo of Google Instant (you can a href="http://www.google.com/webhp?sclient=psy"try it here/a)./p pb9:52 AM:/b Mayer shows that it only takes her six keystrokes to find information about a specific painting at the MOMA. /p pSwitching between search predictions can be done with up and down arrows./p img alt="goog_demo.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/goog_demo.png" width="610" height="340" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pb9:54 AM:/b "It's not search 'as you type,' but 'search before you type.'" "We can predict what you are likely to type and give you those results in real time." /p pb9:55 AM:/b Google used this idea of "search before you type" as an April Fool's joke 10 years ago. /p img alt="goog_browsers.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/goog_browsers.png" width="610" height="340" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pWill be available later today. Available on Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE8. Will be part of the core Google search experience on Google.com in the U.S. starting this week. International sites - Germany, Italy, etc. - later this month./p pb9:57 AM:/b With this, Google will save its users 11 hours each second. /p pb9:58 AM:/b Johanna Wright (director of product management on search) and Othar Hansson on stage./p pThe gears that make Instant Search work: instant results, predictions, scroll to search./p img alt="goog_gears.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/goog_gears.png" width="610" height="338" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pb10:00 AM:/b Very staged, stiff presentation. Team shows how weather for San Francisco comes up in Instant Search with just one keystroke. /p pSecond example: auto-completes "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" - black text in search box shows what the user typed - grey text is the predicted search. p"It's not quite psychic, but it's very clever."/p pb10:03 AM:/b Third example: "Yosemite" - use arrow keys to switch between predictions ("scroll to search")./p pb10:04 AM:/b The real power in this is when all of these gears work together ("feedback"). /p pMore examples ("Addams family")./p pb10:06 AM:/b "What the heck is the search button still there for?" /p pSame results as you are used to. "If you know how to use Google Search today, you know how to use Google Instant."/p pb10:08 AM:/b Yet another example. /p pb10:10 AM:/b A sneak peek of what's coming soon: instant search for mobile. Coming later this Fall (we can see how this would be even more useful on mobile. /p img alt="Screen shot 2010-09-08 at 10.11.37 AM.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/Screen%20shot%202010-09-08%20at%2010.11.37%20AM.png" width="610" height="340" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pVideo of user testimonials from usability lab. Girl: "It was pretty fabulous." Old guy: "I appreciate that you made it easier for us old guys to use the computer."/p h2The Engineering Behind Instant Search/h2 pb10:14 AM:/b How can we make this vision a reality? How can we create a user interface that's easy to use? How can we make it useful on your computer? How can we make it work without melting our data centers? /p pGoogle tried this a long time ago. Unless the prediction works well, it's not effective to even try instant search - too costly to implement and not useful for users./p img alt="goog_efficient.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/goog_efficient.png" width="610" height="342" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pb10:16 AM:/b Now: With predictions, this can be done. Google tested this internally and then did live experiments with millions of users. "People learn how to use this very quickly."/p img alt="goog_eyetrack.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/goog_eyetrack.png" width="610" height="338" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pVideo of eyetracking study. Shows the power of the predictive text and how fast users learn to use the new system./p pb10:20 AM:/b Results pages are now in AJAX. Explain the HTTP flow behind Instant Search. "We had to optimized a lot of JavaScript and work around browser performance issues." /p img alt="goog_autorequestslide.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/goog_autorequestslide.png" width="610" height="341" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pb10:22 AM:/b "How do we do this without melting down our data centers."/p pIf Google Instant did a new search for every letter you typed, this couldn't work. Google can't handle 20 times amount the search traffic./p PHow does Google scale this? Optimizations: prioritizes searches that are the most likely. Checks if users is doing searches on another server. Results cached./p img alt="goog_scaleslide.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/goog_scaleslide.png" width="610" height="341" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pb10:26 AM:/b "We work on search because we are engineers. The scale of the problem makes it interesting. But most importantly, we work on search because we believe it matters to people. Helps them make better decisions." /p pLast year alone, Google quietly release over 500 changes to search. "But occasionally, we launch changes that fundamentally change how you use search."/p p"It doesn't just make search faster, but also more fun, fluid and interactive." /p pb10:28 AM:/b Google Instant was a massive change that touched almost every part of how Google serves up results. /p pb10:28 AM:/b Mayer back on stage: Search at the speed of thought./p pWhat makes search better: fun, comprehensiveness and understanding (understanding users' intent and the Web at large).p pMayer: "Google Instant Search is a quantum leap for search."/p pb10:30 AM:/b Over the year, Google Instant will save 350 million hours of Google's users time. /p pIn closing: a Bob Dylan-inspired ad for Google Instant./p img alt="goog_comprehensive.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/goog_comprehensive.png" width="610" height="336" class="mt-image-none" style="" / h2QA/h2 pb10:32 AM:/b strongQ/strong: Robert Scoble: When will this be in browsers? strongA/strong: "This is something we are working on. We expect within the next few months." /p img alt="goog_groupshot.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/goog_groupshot.png" width="610" height="338" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pb10:34 AM:/b strongQ/strong: Effect on AdWords. strongA/strong: No effect on this. Clicks are what matters anyway. /p pb10:35 AM:/b strongQ/strong: About 20% of queries are currently unique. How will this affect this metric? strongA/strong: We don't know yet. /p pb10:36 AM:/bstrong Q/strong: How will this fit in with user's search history. How will these results be tied in there? strongA/strong: In Web history, queries where you did a click will show, as well as results where you paused for more than three seconds. /p pb10:36 AM:/b strongQ/strong (from Irena Slutsky): There seems to be a block list (including for Irena's last name). strongA/strong: We filter for violence, hate and pornography. As a result, if you are typing something that's not appropriate, we won't show those results until you hit enter. /p pb10:38 AM:/b strongQ/strong: How much personal information is needed to make this work and fast? How much more pressure does this put on Google's data centers? strongA/strong: Personal information: unchanged. For data centers: cost of search has been growing anyway and this is in line with Google's predictions. /p img alt="goog_ sergey.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/goog_%20sergey.png" width="610" height="341" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pb10:40 AM:/b strongQ/strong for Sergey Brin: Rate of innovation in user interface. Where will this take us? strongA/strong: This is a new dawn for computing. Things were rather static on the desktop. Over the past several years on the Web (based on the capabilities of browsers, etc.) there is a lot of exciting work going on. This is just a piece of a really changing landscape of computing. The things that will come out from Google and others over the next 10 years will really change how you interact with computing devices. /p pb10:42 AM:/b strongQ/strong (Ben Parr of Mashable): Impact on SEO. strongA/strong: Ranking stays the same. Behavior and the kind of searches we see may change, however. That's a longer term effect and we will understand it better over time. /p pb10:43 AM:/b strongQ/strong: Will this be made available around the world, including China? strongA/strong: Google plans to roll this out everywhere, including the Hong Kong site. /p pb10:44 AM:/b strongQ/strong: Do users want faster search? strongA/strong: yes. /p pb10:45 AM:/b strongQ/strong for Sergey: Are you concerned about the fact that we are giving up some privacy to get these better search results: strongA/strong: Users place a lot of trust with us. We have to be great stewards of your information. Google Instant isn't any different in that respect./p pb10:46 AM:/b strongQ/strong: How will behavior and search change over time? strongA/strong: As you use it more, you may do more searches in neighboring topics. Easier to explore a topic. /p pb10:47 AM:/b strongQ/strong: How many users didn't want this during testing? How does this relate to Caffeine? strongA/strong: Some users turned it off (there is a switch that allows you to turn it off). Very small percentage. They mostly turned it off because they were on slow connections. About Caffeine: not directly related, but the faster and real-time index made this a bit harder./p pb10:49 AM:/b strongQ/strong: Is this the death of SEO? strongA/strong: We're sure the SEOs are smart and can catch up with us. /p pb10:50 AM:/b strongQ/strong (for Sergey Brin): Did you ever think this would be possible? strongA/strong: Yes - but it's really thanks to the advance of computing power that this is now possible. /p pb10:51 AM:/b strongQ/strong: Lots of people consume the content that a very small percentage of users create. How can you change that? How can you get more people to contribute? strongA/strong (Brin): To do a great job at search, we need lots of content. We use AdSense to help people make money from their content. Authoring tools like Blogger, Docs etc. We don't expect people to create all their content on Google. /p pb10:53 AM:/b strongQ/strong: Plans to make this even faster or are the technical limits at present? strongA/strong: "Today we will enjoy the speed of this and tomorrow we will work on making this even faster." /p pb10:54 AM:/b strongQ/strong (Irena Slutsky from AdAge): How does this affect smaller brands. Does the lower half of the page and page two still matter? strongA/strong: The user intent doesn't change. If you use page two less, that means you are getting to what you want faster. This is a user-focused launch. We are focused on our users and believe that this is also good for our advertisers. /p pb10:56 AM:/b strongQ/strong: If people conduct more searches now, how will users' interaction with ads change? How often do they stop and click now? strongA/strong: We focus on the user experience. The other effects will follow. /p pb10:57 AM:/b strongQ/strong: What about mobile? When will Google release this in Japan and China? strongA/strong: For both questions:coming in the next few months./p pb10:59 AM:/b strongQ/strong: Can you change the number of suggestions made in the auto-complete? strongA/strong: No - but we always test different UIs. /p pb11:00 AM:/b strongQ/strong (Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land): Changes seem to put even more focus on the top result. How do you improve those results? strongA/strong: Ranking is a problem we obviously work on all the time. This stuff is tough and search quality is not always perfect. /p pAnd that wraps it up for today. Thanks for reading everybody!/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/live_blog_google_search_event.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/YDhmJE-USG79F-MhqqIEGESeu_c/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/YDhmJE-USG79F-MhqqIEGESeu_c/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/YDhmJE-USG79F-MhqqIEGESeu_c/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/YDhmJE-USG79F-MhqqIEGESeu_c/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=IO9D73zb18o:H1FwMp8kFwU:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=IO9D73zb18o:H1FwMp8kFwU:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=IO9D73zb18o:H1FwMp8kFwU:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=IO9D73zb18o:H1FwMp8kFwU:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=IO9D73zb18o:H1FwMp8kFwU:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=IO9D73zb18o:H1FwMp8kFwU:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=IO9D73zb18o:H1FwMp8kFwU:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=IO9D73zb18o:H1FwMp8kFwU:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=IO9D73zb18o:H1FwMp8kFwU:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=IO9D73zb18o:H1FwMp8kFwU:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=IO9D73zb18o:H1FwMp8kFwU:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/IO9D73zb18o" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/data_explosion.jpg"Earlier today, ReadWriteWeb editor Richard MacManus examined a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_future_of_social_objects.php"the future of social objects/a - that is, the future of the a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/internet-of-things/"Internet of Things/a. This slow-growing trend encompasses how real-world objects are connected to the Internet using various technologies, including RFID chips, barcodes, sensors, bots and, to some extent, even mobile applications like a href="http://getglue.com/"Glue/a, which attaches a social history of sorts to an object like a book or a bottle of wine, albeit somewhat virtually. /p pWhile on the one hand, the idea of these self-aware "social objects" is intriguing, especially when you examine use cases like the "social tennis racquet," a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_future_of_social_objects.php"as MacManus did/a, there is a flip side. Social objects can tattle on you, reporting data you don't wish to share. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21703amp;cb=21703' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21703amp;n=21703' border='0' alt='' //a/p pCase in point: a reader on technology news site a href="http://www.techdirt.com/"TechDirt/a alerted a href="http://www.techdirt.com/search.php?aid=mmasnick"them/a to a city initiative in Cleveland, Ohio, where RFID chips are being placed on recycling bins to monitor whether or not the bin has been taken to the curb. In theory, at least, this is helpful, useful data to the city's trash-collecting department. If a chip reports that you haven't been taking your bin to the curb for a number of weeks, a trash supervisor will sort through your garbage for recyclable items, saving them from the dump. /p pemstrongRFID data helps save Mother Earth, right? /strong/em/p pWell, yes...but.../p pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/timaxtagsensor_aug10.jpg" align="right"The catch here is that trash carts containing more than 10% recyclable material can lead to a $100 fine, according to Waste Collection Commissioner Ronnie Owens, as reported by local website a href="http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2010/08/city_of_cleveland_to_use_high-.html"Cleveland.com/a. The pilot program for these RFID-enabled bins began in 2007 with 15,000 households participating. The city has now approved spending $2.5 million on high-tech bins for 25,000 households and will continue at 25,000 households per year until all of the city's 150,000 residents are covered. /p pOn a personal level, you may support this "recycle or be fined" program, especially given the troubling state of the world's environment. Maybe it's time for recycling to move from being a personal choice to a legal requirement? /p h2Tattletaling Objects/h2 pThe implications of these data-collecting, tattletaling objects and their use by government cannot be overlooked. It begins with spying on your trash, but what's next? Parking meters that know you snagged a few extra minutes because no one was around to write a ticket? Oh wait, a href="http://www.parking-net.com/News/19295/New-GPRS-based-enforcement-system-for-the-Comet-personal-parking-meter"that already exists/a. Vibration sensors that report when illegals cross the border? Hmm, a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SBInet"that was done too/a. Biometric passports? a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_passport"We're already there/a.Digital billboards that can be used for surveillance? a href="http://www.privacylives.com/wall-street-journal-billboards-that-can-see-you/2010/09/08/"Yikes/a. Trees that report back when poached? a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_intelligent_wood_project.php"Done/a. A plan to coat the planet in billions of sensors that can monitor traffic, analyze climate change, oh, and recognize people, too? a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cense_hp_labs.php" In progress/a. /p pBy themselves, none of these current use-cases alone are a major affront to personal freedom (in this author's opinion, that is). But there are many privacy advocates out there who find measures like these egregious violations of of our civil liberties. /p pEven if you fall more on the side ofem "eh, who cares?",/em try this: strongemimagine a future where all objects are "social" data-collectors/em/strong who can report their use, their history, their location, etc. Now imagine the government or corporations accessing that data and taking action based on what the objects' data tells them. Did your opinion change? If so, why?/p pThis article is not meant to be alarmist - here at ReadWriteWeb, we're big supporters of a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/internet-of-things/"the Internet of Things/a and its potential. However, the trend has other implications for our world which may be less than positive - those need to be examined, too. /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_the_internet_of_things_may_be_used_against_you.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/dmX3w7tyQiAeQncLmkPK23meOa4/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/dmX3w7tyQiAeQncLmkPK23meOa4/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/dmX3w7tyQiAeQncLmkPK23meOa4/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/dmX3w7tyQiAeQncLmkPK23meOa4/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=847tEMoXOEw:LsZoJNNa_dw:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=847tEMoXOEw:LsZoJNNa_dw:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=847tEMoXOEw:LsZoJNNa_dw:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=847tEMoXOEw:LsZoJNNa_dw:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=847tEMoXOEw:LsZoJNNa_dw:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=847tEMoXOEw:LsZoJNNa_dw:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=847tEMoXOEw:LsZoJNNa_dw:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=847tEMoXOEw:LsZoJNNa_dw:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=847tEMoXOEw:LsZoJNNa_dw:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=847tEMoXOEw:LsZoJNNa_dw:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=847tEMoXOEw:LsZoJNNa_dw:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/847tEMoXOEw" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="researchgate_logo.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/researchgate_logo.jpg" width="150" height="79" class="mt-image-none" style="" /Despite the continued growth and popularity of Facebook, a number of a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_rise_of_the_anti-facebooks.php"alternate social networking sites/a are cropping up in order to the needs of groups in ways that Facebook can't. One such group is scientists and scholars, who want to have a platform for communication and collaboration, but one that focuses on research interest and reading lists, not just friends and family./p pAnd more and more - 2000 a day - are joining a href="http://www.researchgate.net"ResearchGATE/a, a startup that hopes to connect scientists, researchers, and scholars worldwide./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21702amp;cb=21702' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21702amp;n=21702' border='0' alt='' //a/p pResearchGATE was founded in 2008 by Dr. Ijad Madisch, an award-winning scientist who earned his M.D. and Ph.D. from the Medical School of Hannover, Germany and currently performing research at Harvard Medical School, S�ren Hofmayer, who earned his M.D., from the Medical School of Hannover, and Horst Fickenscher, a computer scientist who earned his graduate degree at the University of Passau, Germany. The background of the founders helped them recognize the specialized needs of scientists and scholars, and according to Madisch the site has been built to address those needs./p h2Meeting the Communication and Collaboration Needs of the Scientific Community/h2 pInitially, says Madisch, ResearchGATE offered merely profiles. But as more scientists joined - the site now has 500,000 registered users from 200 countries - features were added so that scholars could present their research and participate in QA groups. On ResearchGATE you can list what projects you're working on and what literature you're reading, making it easier for scholars to see what others in the field are thinking and, in the words of Madisch, making "discovering papers social." /p pUnlike a site like Facebook, scholars have followers, rather than just "friends," which makes sense as, say, a grad student might want to follow a prestigious scholar in her or his field, but might not be able to claim the person as a direct contact. In addition to fostering communication and collaboration among researchers working on similar projects, ResearchGATE also fosters cross-discipline collaboration, as a scholars in a variety of fields can share research results and methodologies. And it's not just "hard science," either. According to Madisch, philosophers make up one of the largest disciplines represented on the site./p pResearchGATE announces today that it has secured a Series A round of financing led by Benchmark Capital with participation from Accel Partners' Silicon Valley office and prominent investors from the UK and Germany. With the funding, ResearchGATE plans to expand its team and add new features to meet the needs of users, including calendaring and virtual conferencing./p pimg alt="researchgate_ss.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/researchgate_ss.jpg" width="600" height="374" class="mt-image-none" style="" //p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/researchgate_offers_social_networking_for_scholars.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/fHWbza79aoU_qvycGWbJqdRt41k/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/fHWbza79aoU_qvycGWbJqdRt41k/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/fHWbza79aoU_qvycGWbJqdRt41k/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/fHWbza79aoU_qvycGWbJqdRt41k/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=0LIuDWJUNmc:o02ftIaTTGw:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=0LIuDWJUNmc:o02ftIaTTGw:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=0LIuDWJUNmc:o02ftIaTTGw:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=0LIuDWJUNmc:o02ftIaTTGw:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=0LIuDWJUNmc:o02ftIaTTGw:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=0LIuDWJUNmc:o02ftIaTTGw:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=0LIuDWJUNmc:o02ftIaTTGw:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=0LIuDWJUNmc:o02ftIaTTGw:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=0LIuDWJUNmc:o02ftIaTTGw:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=0LIuDWJUNmc:o02ftIaTTGw:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=0LIuDWJUNmc:o02ftIaTTGw:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/0LIuDWJUNmc" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/iphone_apps_logo_aug09.jpg"There's a href="http://www.asymco.com/2010/09/08/itunes-app-total-downloads-to-overtake-songs-this-year/"an interesting chart/a making its way around the Net this morning comparing the number of iTunes app downloads to the total downloads of songs. The surprising reveal is that it shows apps are being downloaded much more rapidly than songs. In only 2.2 years, the iTunes App Store has reached the same total downloads as the iTunes Music Store did after five years. And before the year is out, the two curves on the chart will be around the same height - 13 billion downloads each./p pWhy is this happening? Why are apps becoming more popular than music? /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21701amp;cb=21701' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21701amp;n=21701' border='0' alt='' //a/p h2More Apps Downloaded Than Songs by Year-End/h2 pThe original chart was posted on a href="http://www.asymco.com/2010/09/08/itunes-app-total-downloads-to-overtake-songs-this-year/"Asymco's website/a, home to a hybrid industry analysis advisory and app development firm. Assuming the data the firm has collected is accurate (they say it comes from statements made by Apple representatives), Apple customers will have downloaded more iPhone/iPod/iPad apps than songs sometime in the near future, either by year end or just a few weeks later. /p pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/itunes_downloads_chart.png"/p pThat's a staggering thought, when you really think about it. After all, the original iPhone didn't even support the development of third-party mobile applications when it launched in summer 2007. It wasn't until March of the following year that Apple released development tools (the iPhone SDK, or software development kit), allowing aspiring developers to begin work on mobile creations that would run on an upcoming version of the iPhone operating system, due out later that summer./p pWhen launched, however, these natively-built iPhone applications quickly became more popular the previously supported "Web applications" in terms of usage. App downloads surged and have been surging ever since. /p pemstrongBut why are these apps, popular as they may be, on the path to besting music in terms of sheer download numbers?/strong/em /p pOuriel Ohayon, the creator of mobile application sharing and discovery platform a href="http://appsfire.com"AppsFire/a, has ventured a few guesses and we think he's right on the money. Here are the reasons he puts forth on the a href="http://blog.appsfire.com/more-apps-downloaded-than-songs-not-really-a"AppsFire blog/a:/p h21. Apps Let You Personalize Your Phone/h2 pApps let you personalize your phone in the same way as only ringtones and wallpapers once did. They are a href="http://blog.appsfire.com/apps-are-the-new-music-playlists"the new music playlists/a, in a sense, he says. In many ways I think that's true - I know the first thing I do when I get hold of someone else's mobile phone is look at what apps they're using. I could care less what their musical interests are. However, I don't think this is the main reason for the trend. /p h22.Many Apps are Free/h2 pOhayon says that apps are surpassing music in part because so many of them are free. That's hard to argue with. Apps are probably sampled more often because they're free. However, some of those free apps probably aren't used as often as the 99-cent song you knew you liked enough to purchase is listened to. Nor do free apps make up the majority of iPhone apps available for sale - a href="http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/08/27/the-mobile-app-divide-free-rules-on-android-paid-rules-on-iphone/"roughly 70% are paid/a. Free apps cater to our desire to buy things on impulse, but without the guilt of throwing our money away. So what if you only play that game once? It was worth the price - nothing - to kill five minutes of time while in the waiting room of the doctor's office. /p h23. Apps Provide Downloaded Music Substitutes/h2 pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/usher_iphone.png" align="right"Mobile applications like Pandora, Last.fm, Deezer, Spotify, MOG and Rdio provide free and/or paid subscriptions to streaming music. You don't need to download and pay for a song in iTunes if you use one of these applications - you can just listen to it over the Internet instead. Apple itself may have caught onto this trend, too. The company recently purchased streaming service Lala.com, which many suspect will be turned into a subscription-based, Internet music streaming service for iTunes./p pIn addition, some apps emare/em music themselves. Ohayon points to apps like a href="http://getap.ps/+365564492/+search"this Lady Gaga one/a or this a href="http://getap.ps/+365564492/+search"Katy Perry one/a, for example, that package popular music within mobile applications. Some games also feature music like a href="http://getap.ps/+387109933/+search"Katy Perry Revenge/a ora href="http://getap.ps/lyriclegend" Lyric Legend/a, which, when you think about it, is actually a new format for listening to music. But there are many, many others beyond the few mentioned here. /p pIn fact, we spotted this trend nearly a year ago, noting the rise of "music-themed" apps that offer tunes and other content from artists. We then cited examples from NIN, Moby and Usher as artists who were using apps to promote their songs. (See: "a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/forget_the_itunes_lp_apps_are_the_new_album.php"Forget the iTunes LP, Apps are the New Album/a"). Still, the most devoted fans will probably buy both the app emand /emthe album, since only the latter usually works in playlists and when you go offline. /p pWhile no single reason can explain this trend in its entirety, the reasons put forth by Ohayon are reasoned and sound, we think. Asymco's Horace Dediu agrees, a href="http://www.asymco.com/2010/09/08/itunes-app-total-downloads-to-overtake-songs-this-year/comment-page-1/#comment-2450"responding to Ohayon via the comments of the post/a, saying "apps are indeed content," referring to how apps can replace other forms of content. "Apps-as-media has implications in the way they are produced, marketed, priced and consumed," writes Dediu. "All the data since has been nothing but confirmation of this."/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/iphone_apps_overtaking_songs_in_terms_of_total_downloads.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/N1OqCPDZCSRZkN5wYtxytL_4RRY/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/N1OqCPDZCSRZkN5wYtxytL_4RRY/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/N1OqCPDZCSRZkN5wYtxytL_4RRY/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/N1OqCPDZCSRZkN5wYtxytL_4RRY/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1RGNidPAnP4:9eAynZAhzGw:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1RGNidPAnP4:9eAynZAhzGw:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1RGNidPAnP4:9eAynZAhzGw:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1RGNidPAnP4:9eAynZAhzGw:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1RGNidPAnP4:9eAynZAhzGw:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=1RGNidPAnP4:9eAynZAhzGw:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1RGNidPAnP4:9eAynZAhzGw:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=1RGNidPAnP4:9eAynZAhzGw:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1RGNidPAnP4:9eAynZAhzGw:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=1RGNidPAnP4:9eAynZAhzGw:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1RGNidPAnP4:9eAynZAhzGw:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/1RGNidPAnP4" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="Website statistics" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/website_statistics_0910.jpg" width="100" height="91" /Google Analytics (GA) is a decent service for tracking activity on your site, however, there are times when it may be necessary to log some statistics yourself./p pBy its nature, GA does not include any information that would allow you to identify emwho/em visited a page or clicked a link. Also, GA does not give immediate updates - you have to wait up to 24 hours to see the current day's stats./p pA site that provides recommendations to registered users may wish to log some of their own statistics (Amazon, for instance). An ad network may want to log impressions and clicks on their widget. What do you need to be aware of when logging your own stats?/p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21649amp;cb=21649' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21649amp;n=21649' border='0' alt='' //a/p h2Writing to Text Files/h2 pIf you're going to run a widget on any site with high traffic, you may run into problems if you try to write to your database directly from the script that runs the widget./p pA safer though not particularly elegant solution is to write to text files instead. Each file should allow you to easily recognise what it's for, e.g. the filename "Advert1000" could be used to log stats for advert ID 1000. Or, you could store all advert stats in a folder called emadvert-stats/em and just put the ID in the filename./p h2Beware of Write Clashes/h2 pIf you're using text files, it may be safest to log a random number as part of the filename in case a large number of visitors clock up stats at the same time. e.g. "Advert1000_12345678". The ID is still in the filename, and the random number appears at the end of the filename, with an underscore as a delimeter./p pOf course, don't just hard-code the same random number for each file or it's not going to work./p h2Gather the Stats Regularly/h2 pYou'll need to set up a cron job to regularly parse and then delete your stats files. If you're using a random number in the filename, it's much less likely that you'll lose some stats by reading a file, writing to your database and deleting the file afterwards - on a busy site, you may find that some views have been logged in the file since you started reading it./p h2Look At Alternative Database Options/h2 pLogging a lot of statistics for a lot of sites is going to result in you having to store a lot of data. Typically, this type of data only needs to be stored and retrieved - once you've collected all of your stat files for a given day, you won't be going back and updating those values./p pAs a result, it's worthwhile looking at other databases for storing your stats. a href="http://www.infobright.org/"Infobright/a is one option you could look at. It allows you to store very large amounts of data and run queries against it in a fraction of the time that it would take, say, MySQL./p pYou don't have to change your entire application to use a different database engine - in fact it's probably best that you don't. Just the statistics will do./p h2Start Small, Work Up/h2 pOnce you start logging your first statistics, you may start thinking of many other stats that you could log. It's really important to get it right with your first attempt before adding more statistics to your site. Starting with something such as total pageviews is best. You can then look at unique views, clicks and so on once your stats have started to build up./p pWatch out for today's Hack of the Day, where I'll be showing you a tool that can be used to display your stats in a graph./p pemPhoto by a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/2121472112/"kevindooley/a/em/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2010/09/tips-for-logging-your-own-stat.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/99WfDl0BlbrHodhiYK3jrbaJQEg/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/99WfDl0BlbrHodhiYK3jrbaJQEg/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/99WfDl0BlbrHodhiYK3jrbaJQEg/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/99WfDl0BlbrHodhiYK3jrbaJQEg/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=AGvT_g3xP5g:Mc6UFYOg9nI:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=AGvT_g3xP5g:Mc6UFYOg9nI:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=AGvT_g3xP5g:Mc6UFYOg9nI:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=AGvT_g3xP5g:Mc6UFYOg9nI:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=AGvT_g3xP5g:Mc6UFYOg9nI:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=AGvT_g3xP5g:Mc6UFYOg9nI:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=AGvT_g3xP5g:Mc6UFYOg9nI:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=AGvT_g3xP5g:Mc6UFYOg9nI:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=AGvT_g3xP5g:Mc6UFYOg9nI:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=AGvT_g3xP5g:Mc6UFYOg9nI:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=AGvT_g3xP5g:Mc6UFYOg9nI:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/AGvT_g3xP5g" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="CouchOne_logo.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/CouchOne_logo.jpg" width="150" height="46" class="mt-image-none" style="" /Couchio, the corporate sponsor of a href="http://couchdb.apache.org/"CouchDB/a, announces today that it is changing its name to a href="http://www.couchone.com"CouchOne/a and introducing CouchOne Mobile, a mobile app development platform based on CouchDB./p pAs with many noSQL databases, there's been an explosion of interest and implementation in CouchDB, and we've written recently about a number of organizations and projects using CouchDB, including the a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2010/08/lhc-couchdb.php"large hadron collider scientists at CERN/a. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21700amp;cb=21700' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21700amp;n=21700' border='0' alt='' //a/p pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/images/couchdb_logo_0710.png" align="right"The benefits of CouchDB include not only the database's reliability and ease-of-use but its built-in synchronization and replication. And its the latter that makes it an excellent choice for developing mobile apps that can work even with the Internet connection is slow, spotty, or absent altogether. Furthermore, CouchDB is lightweight and easy on the battery life as data is kept offline. /p pCouchOne Mobile will allow developers to write apps, scale vertically and share data and applications across the computing platforms and mobile devices they choose. "Based on CouchDB, CouchOne Mobile is way more than a database," says the new company website. "It's a full-stack web app deployment environment with a database, a JavaScript interpreter (middleware layer) and a mini web server (web tier) all in one convenient carrying case."/p pCouchDB already integrates with Android, and according to Damien Katz, CouchDB creator and CEO of CouchOne, an iPhone version is "in the works." /p pa href="http://couchcamp2010.eventbrite.com/"CouchCamp/a takes place from today through September 10, where participants will be able to have a hands-on look at the new mobile development platform./p pobject width="560" height="340"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/4QoCRIIETOA?fs=1amp;hl=en_US"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/4QoCRIIETOA?fs=1amp;hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"/embed/object/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/09/couchio-becomes-couchone-and-i.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3cuB6l9Yx2JW957CVUHaGpNfggg/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3cuB6l9Yx2JW957CVUHaGpNfggg/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3cuB6l9Yx2JW957CVUHaGpNfggg/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3cuB6l9Yx2JW957CVUHaGpNfggg/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QKc14_OhF2w:m9ZKcNUv81I:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QKc14_OhF2w:m9ZKcNUv81I:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QKc14_OhF2w:m9ZKcNUv81I:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QKc14_OhF2w:m9ZKcNUv81I:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QKc14_OhF2w:m9ZKcNUv81I:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=QKc14_OhF2w:m9ZKcNUv81I:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QKc14_OhF2w:m9ZKcNUv81I:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=QKc14_OhF2w:m9ZKcNUv81I:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QKc14_OhF2w:m9ZKcNUv81I:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=QKc14_OhF2w:m9ZKcNUv81I:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QKc14_OhF2w:m9ZKcNUv81I:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/QKc14_OhF2w" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/social_objects_150.jpg" /The a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/internet-of-things/"Internet of Things/a, when real world objects are connected to the Internet, has been slow to attract the attention of budding entrepreneurs. However, there has been some startup action in so-called "social objects." We've covered two companies in this domain in recent times, a href="http://www.stickybits.com/"StickyBits/a and a href="http://talesofthings.com/"TalesOfThings/a. The New York Times a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/magazine/05FOB-Consumed-t.html?src=tptw"profiled/a a third company in this space over the weekend, a href="http://itizen.com/"Itizen/a./p pAll of these startups are searching for a business model, but there is massive long term potential in this market. Leandro Agro, CEO of sensor data company a href="http://www.widetag.com/"WideTag/a (a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/internet_of_things_can_make_us_human_again.php"our review/a), says that by 2050 objects will be judged more for their 'sociality' than their aesthetic value. It's an intriguing notion, so in this post we imagine what a 'social' tennis racquet might look like in 40 years./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21699amp;cb=21699' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21699amp;n=21699' border='0' alt='' //a/p h2Living Objects/h2 pIn an interview for Wired Italy and the Venice Biennale of Architecture, a href="http://www.widetag.com/2010/09/07/imagine-the-social-objects-and-design-of-2050/"transcribed/a on the WideTag blog by David Orban, Leandro Agro said that quot;tomorrow a social object might be associated with Italy not because of its aesthetic value but because of its level of 'sociality'.quot; He sees an opportunity for his country, Italy, to take a leadership role in re-inventing the design of objects:/p blockquote pquot;Every object should tell its own story. The story of its past (what it is made of, where it was produced, how it is used) and its future (how to differentiate it, how to take it apart, how to recycle it). It should be actively self-aware (being sentient or at least having some idea of the time and place for its own use), be connected and social, in other words it should belong to us humans, "living" as part of our digital and social network. quot;/p /blockquote pI expressed a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/objects_are_not_social.php"skepticism about social objects/a earlier this year, because the a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/stickybits_portal_to_another_dimension_or_graffiti.php"early startups/a in this domain were attempting to create emnew/em social networks on top of objects. I still think that's the wrong model. However, there is a lot of scope for online data from objects to contribute to your emexisting/em social networks./p pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/itizen_screenshot.jpg" //p h2A Social Tennis Racquet (Circa 2050)/h2 pUsing Agro's vision, here is one possible scenario./p pImagine a tennis racquet with an RFID chip embedded in it. The chip specifies the materials the racquet was made with, which factory it was produced in and on what date, the strengths of that particular racquet compared to other models, and so on./p pThen when the racquet is bought, the chip tracks the emusage/em of the racquet. It will monitor for damage and wear, how often the strings are tightened or swapped out, and so on. It might also send to and receive information from other computing chips - in tennis courts, in the racquets of other players, inside tennis clubs, etc. This would enable the tennis racquet to, for example, automatically track the tournaments its owner enters and the games she plays in (let's assume this is an amateur player, since professional tennis players swap racquets every set or so!)./p pimg src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4028/4273415761_85daa7b3d8_m.jpg" align="right" /This Internet-connected tennis racquet has a social element because it is being used by a person, who presumably uses the racquet to play tennis with other people. So that data from the racquet can be a contributor to social networks. /p pUsing today's social networks to illustrate the point (although surely these will be seen as rather primitive examples of social networks in 40 years time), imagine your tennis racquet automatically checking you in to a tennis court on Foursquare. Or the racquet updating your Facebook page when you defeat your mate in a social game of tennis. Or your racquet sending you a DM on Twitter when it requires string tightening (!). /p pThese and many other scenarios will occur over time, as objects get connected to the Internet and the resulting data meshes in with your social networks. So by extension, the tennis racquet will become a 'social object.'/p pWhile this is a future-looking scenario, are you aware of objects that are already 'social'? And do you think StickyBits, TalesofThings, Itizen and others are on the right track to realize this vision?/p !--start:nonyt-- pemImage credit: a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/siddylam/4273415761/"Siddhartha Lammata/a/em/p !--end:nonyt-- stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_future_of_social_objects.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/mWkyDUTxZvEF1GRvaJWH6l4eiyk/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/mWkyDUTxZvEF1GRvaJWH6l4eiyk/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/mWkyDUTxZvEF1GRvaJWH6l4eiyk/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/mWkyDUTxZvEF1GRvaJWH6l4eiyk/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=rL3OBgibh6M:McEBbCzG0xc:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=rL3OBgibh6M:McEBbCzG0xc:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=rL3OBgibh6M:McEBbCzG0xc:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=rL3OBgibh6M:McEBbCzG0xc:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=rL3OBgibh6M:McEBbCzG0xc:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=rL3OBgibh6M:McEBbCzG0xc:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=rL3OBgibh6M:McEBbCzG0xc:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=rL3OBgibh6M:McEBbCzG0xc:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=rL3OBgibh6M:McEBbCzG0xc:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=rL3OBgibh6M:McEBbCzG0xc:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=rL3OBgibh6M:McEBbCzG0xc:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/rL3OBgibh6M" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/assets_c/2010/06/chatter_coll_cloud_onBlue_rgb-thumb-150x105-18622.png" a href="http://forrester.com"Forrester/a analyst Tim Sheedy writes in a href="http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/insights_for_cios_make_mobility_standard_business/q/id/57038/t/2?src=RSS_2cm_mmc=Forrester-_-RSS-_-Document-_-8"a new report/a that "The Internet and the mobile Internet have effectively combined." Facebook users who access the social networking site through a mobile device are a href="http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics"twice/a as active as users who don't. It's no surprise then to see the announcement of a href="http://salesforce.com"Salesforce.com/a's Chatter Mobile, a mobile client for the company's increasingly popular a href="http://www.salesforce.com/chatter/"Chatter/a social networking and microblogging platform./p pChatter Mobile apps for BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone and the new iPod touch will be available in late 2010, with Android support coming in the first half of 2011./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21697amp;cb=21697' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21697amp;n=21697' border='0' alt='' //a/p pimg alt="Chatter for iPhone" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/images/chatter_iphone_0910.jpg" width="150" height="307" //p pChatter's simple, Facebook-like interface accomplishes the goal of most enterprise 2.0 platforms: making enterprise technologies as accessible as consumer technologies. According to Kraig Swensrud, Senior Vice President of Product Marketing at Salesforce.com, Chatter is its most successful product launch yet. The product, which came out of beta in June, is now in use by 20,000 companies. Many are Salesforce.com CRM customers, but many new customers are also picking up Chatter and using it independently of the company's flagship product. Some companies, like a href="http://nokia.com"Nokia/a are even deploying Chatter enterprise wide./p pSaleforce.com's mobile CRM app has also been successful, with over 250,000 downloads from the Apple App Store and over 100,000 from the BlackBerry App World./p pSalesforce.com is aggressively targeting enterprise mobility and social networking as several competitors are eying the same space. a href="http://yammer.com"Yammer/a recently a href="http://blog.yammer.com/blog/2010/09/announcing-the-launch-of-the-yammer-platform.html"announced/a it will expand beyond microblogging into general enterprise social networking and a href="http://www.rhologic.com/"RhoLogic/a recently released a mobile a href="http://sugarcrm.com"SugarCRM/a client. Expect to see this space heating up more in coming months as mobility continues to mainstream./p pSee our coverage of Chatter a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/06/salesforcecom-has-facebook-in.php"from June/a for more information the service./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2010/09/enterprise-mobility-heats-up-w.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/qzylaSoG8QUJ6r51BVuu4RX4so0/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/qzylaSoG8QUJ6r51BVuu4RX4so0/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/qzylaSoG8QUJ6r51BVuu4RX4so0/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/qzylaSoG8QUJ6r51BVuu4RX4so0/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=bGKvrEmLkaM:id3W0KrM0ho:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=bGKvrEmLkaM:id3W0KrM0ho:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=bGKvrEmLkaM:id3W0KrM0ho:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=bGKvrEmLkaM:id3W0KrM0ho:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=bGKvrEmLkaM:id3W0KrM0ho:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=bGKvrEmLkaM:id3W0KrM0ho:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=bGKvrEmLkaM:id3W0KrM0ho:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=bGKvrEmLkaM:id3W0KrM0ho:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=bGKvrEmLkaM:id3W0KrM0ho:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=bGKvrEmLkaM:id3W0KrM0ho:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=bGKvrEmLkaM:id3W0KrM0ho:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/bGKvrEmLkaM" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="speakertext_logo_sept10.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/speakertext_logo_sept10.jpg" width="150" height="38" class="mt-image-none" style="" /The Internet is a series of tubes - man, that joke just doesn't get old. Or rather, the Internet is a series of text documents. That isn't so funny if you're trying to optimize your search engine rankings for video content on your website. Other than the title and description, videos don't provide the text that robots from Google and others use to create those search rankings. You can, of course, transcribe your videos but that can be time-intensive and cost-prohibitive, particularly if your site is video-heavy./p pEnter a href="http://www.speakertext.com"SpeakerText/a which relaunches today with a transcription service that combines both the human and the artificial - a combination of natural language processing and crowdsourced human transcription. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21698amp;cb=21698' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21698amp;n=21698' border='0' alt='' //a/p pBut SpeakerText offers more than just transcription. Once a video is transcribed and time-coded, SpeakerText loads an interactive transcript player beneath each video. Dubbed the SpeakerBar, this player allows visitors to use the text as a controller, of sorts, for the video they're watching. Click on a word or sentence and the video will skip to that part. Cut and paste a portion of the text to share, and it will contain a link back to that exact part of the video./p pAnd it's that social element, perhaps, that makes SpeakerText's service innovative. This isn't merely a transcript, but an "alternative viral pathway" for video. As CEO Matt Mireles points out, the sort of "closed caption" transcription that we are accustomed to is really a relic of the broadcast era - "linear old school television." SpeakerText, he argues, is "native to 21st century technology."/p pCurrently SpeakerText works with video players from a href="http://www.brightcove.com/en/"Brightcove/a, a href="http://www.youtube.com"YouTube/a, and a href="http://blip.tv/"blip.tv/a. SpeakerText stores the transcripts in the cloud where they can be accessed server-side via an API or a WordPress plugin. /p pTranscription services - both human and machine-based - are notoriously mediocre, but Mireles says that the process his company has created is designed to improve both quality and automation over time. SpeakerText starts at $20 a month, with a $2 per minute charge for the transcriptions, a price that seems competitive to other a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/video_transcription_service_offers_word-by.php"similar services/a./p piUpdate: We have 100 beta invitations for ReadWriteWeb readers: Visit the a href="http://www.speakertext.com"site/a and use the code "readwrite."/i/p pobject width="560" height="340"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/9g-sN0Bd79A?fs=1amp;hl=en_US"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/9g-sN0Bd79A?fs=1amp;hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"/embed/object/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/speakertext_builds_the_missing_text_layer_for_onli.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/xjlv3Zviuo05BoQuRSOa7wUh_RU/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/xjlv3Zviuo05BoQuRSOa7wUh_RU/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/xjlv3Zviuo05BoQuRSOa7wUh_RU/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/xjlv3Zviuo05BoQuRSOa7wUh_RU/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QGmYuTgRE38:9BiEvZdlQ90:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QGmYuTgRE38:9BiEvZdlQ90:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QGmYuTgRE38:9BiEvZdlQ90:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QGmYuTgRE38:9BiEvZdlQ90:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QGmYuTgRE38:9BiEvZdlQ90:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=QGmYuTgRE38:9BiEvZdlQ90:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QGmYuTgRE38:9BiEvZdlQ90:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=QGmYuTgRE38:9BiEvZdlQ90:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QGmYuTgRE38:9BiEvZdlQ90:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=QGmYuTgRE38:9BiEvZdlQ90:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QGmYuTgRE38:9BiEvZdlQ90:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/QGmYuTgRE38" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="priority_inbox_logo_aug10.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/priority_inbox_logo_aug10.jpg" width="150" height="141" class="mt-image-none" style="" /Google a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_launches_priority_inbox_to_fight_email_overload.php"rolled out/a a new inbox last week that, in theory, separates your important emails from your unimportant emails and lets you speed through work faster. /p pMost of the initial reaction reflected users' concerns as email recipients - excitement about reading email faster, worry about missing something urgent because Google didn't think it was important. But most of us who receive email also send email, and we want those emails to be read. Are we entering an era of optimizing our emails for the Priority Inbox, just as we optimize our websites and blogs for Google search?/p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21696amp;cb=21696' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21696amp;n=21696' border='0' alt='' //a/p h2The death of email marketing?/h2 pEmail marketers in particular were scrambling after Google announced Priority Inbox. The blog Marketing Professor introduced a new term to describe the divide between priority emails and non-priority emails - the "a href="http://www.marketingprofessor.com/email-marketing/what-the-gmail-priority-inbox-means-to-marketers/"Priority Inbox Fold/a."/p pThe marketing blogosphere's conclusion seems to be that Priority Inbox is going to cripple marketers who rely on blasting out messages to a massive list of email addresses, but that it will be a boon to marketers who are trying to figure out how to really engage their audiences. /p pimg alt="priority-inbox-fold.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/priority-inbox-fold.jpg" width="607" height="417" class="mt-image-none" style="" /emExcerpt and illustration from a a href="http://www.marketingprofessor.com/email-marketing/what-the-gmail-priority-inbox-means-to-marketers/"post/a on the blog Marketing Professor about the "Priority Inbox Fold."/em/p pSome marketers have a href="http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/6500-gmail-priority-inbox-implications-for-email-marketers"kicked around ideas/a like adding the word "important" to every email, emphasizing upcoming deadlines in the text or having a competition that requires your subscribers to reply. But most are upbeat - as marketers often are - about Priority Inbox./p p"Gmail's Priority Inbox Isn't a Threat, But An Opportunity," a href="http://blog.sendlabs.com/2010/09/email-marketing-industry-gmails-priority-inbox-isnt-a-threat-but-an-opportunity/"booms a headline/a on email marketing blog Notes from the Lab. "Doesn't this just place a spotlight on what email marketers should be doing better than anyone? Providing value so the minute an email comes in from a sender, it's received with positive thoughts in mind? If you're doing things the right way, you shouldn't worry but be confident you'll be tagged as important."/p h2Fretting about getting priority for outgoing email/h2 pBut what does Priority Inbox mean for ordinary users? The feature seems to err on the side of assigning too much importance to email, as Google doesn't want to burn users right away by burying an email from the boss or a reminder from the dentist. ReadWriteWeb's fearless new researcher a href="http://twitter.com/micahvandegrift"Micah Vandergrift/a tried valiently to send me an email that would be marked non-priority, to no avail./p pEmails that were marked Priority included the subject lines, "This is interesting" (about pizza), "This is not a priority at all" (copy of an email from the Gotham City Beardsmen's Alliance), and a subject-less email which was a list of Micah's favorite bands from Last.fm./p h2Tough to game/h2 pBut Priority Inbox is like a recommendation engine for email. It assigns a list of attributes to each email and watches for patterns as you gently mark emails important or not important by hand. I've only been using Priority Inbox for a week, so it hasn't fully learned the way we do things around here (not priority: humorous emails from uncle, press releases from Vespa. Priority: discount airfare). /p pobject width="640" height="385"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/5nt3gE9dGHQrel=0color1=0xb1b1b1color2=0xd0d0d0hl=en_USfeature=player_embeddedfs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/5nt3gE9dGHQrel=0color1=0xb1b1b1color2=0xd0d0d0hl=en_USfeature=player_embeddedfs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="640" height="385"/embed/object/p pAs time goes on, I have faith that Priority Inbox will learn what I think is important. That's great for receiving email, but a little unnerving for sending it. The personalized algorithm makes it extremely tough to optimize for exposure in Priority Inbox the way we've learned to optimize for Google's search engine. /p pNo doubt tricks will arise, like including urgent-sounding buzzwords in the subject line and making sure that you are included in the recipient's social graph. But based on early experiments, /p pBut that probably reflects reality - senders and recipients are not always in agreement concerning the importance of an email:/p pimg alt="urgent-email.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/urgent-email.jpg" width="605" height="234" class="mt-image-none" style="" //p pAre you worried your emails won't get marked "Priority"?/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/optimizing_for_gmails_priority_inbox.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vDEQmg3mLylpBb1kAP2pDsJQB14/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vDEQmg3mLylpBb1kAP2pDsJQB14/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vDEQmg3mLylpBb1kAP2pDsJQB14/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vDEQmg3mLylpBb1kAP2pDsJQB14/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=xr7fuIYghp0:z-5bpzNsg8A:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=xr7fuIYghp0:z-5bpzNsg8A:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=xr7fuIYghp0:z-5bpzNsg8A:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=xr7fuIYghp0:z-5bpzNsg8A:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=xr7fuIYghp0:z-5bpzNsg8A:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=xr7fuIYghp0:z-5bpzNsg8A:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=xr7fuIYghp0:z-5bpzNsg8A:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=xr7fuIYghp0:z-5bpzNsg8A:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=xr7fuIYghp0:z-5bpzNsg8A:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=xr7fuIYghp0:z-5bpzNsg8A:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=xr7fuIYghp0:z-5bpzNsg8A:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/xr7fuIYghp0" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="mediasync-logo.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/biz/mediasync-logo.png" width="150" /Here at ReadWriteWeb, like other major blogs, we get a ton of email tips everyday from entrepreneurs, PR companies and the general public suggesting story ideas and requesting product reviews./p pSurprisingly, considering the size of our site and the pervasiveness of spam in general, most of these emails are quite interesting and useful. Some of them, however, appear to be blasted out to a list of seemingly random blogs with little forethought, or worse, a political screed written in all caps./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21695amp;cb=21695' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21695amp;n=21695' border='0' alt='' //a/p pFor small businesses and startups especially, getting the word out to relevant media outlets, while important, can be a time-consuming task that competes with each day's list of to-do's. /p pSo how can businesses streamline their media outreach? One answer is a href="http://www.mediasynconline.com" target="_blank"MediaSync/a, a service from Web marketing firm mBlast. MediaSync is a free database of media contacts that enables you to find individual journalists and bloggers based on the topics they tend to cover and the outlets they write for. /p pFor example, a search for "social media" will return a list of bloggers for Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm, CNET and others. /p pEach writer has a profile containing basic contact info, a brief biography, links to their social networking profiles, as well as data about the topics and beats they cover. /p pMediaSync currently boasts 521,899 media contacts in its database, and that number is sure to be growing on a regular basis. /p pThe database is evidently a work in progress, as not all media contact profiles are populated, including those of a few high-profile bloggers and journalists. Nonetheless, MediaSync remains a good way to do some initial research into which media professionals might be most receptive to a given request for coverage. /p pMost tech and business bloggers see a ton of emails fly across their desktop and mobile phones each day, so targeting the right ones might improve your message's chances of getting read and, if you're truly onto something, acted upon. /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/biz/2010/09/improve-your-companys-media-outreach-with-msync.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/gu5liv8ybUggAPt527MYTBtBLOI/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/gu5liv8ybUggAPt527MYTBtBLOI/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/gu5liv8ybUggAPt527MYTBtBLOI/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/gu5liv8ybUggAPt527MYTBtBLOI/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=HyOfv8nL0dE:IzNkiL6IZ0k:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=HyOfv8nL0dE:IzNkiL6IZ0k:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=HyOfv8nL0dE:IzNkiL6IZ0k:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=HyOfv8nL0dE:IzNkiL6IZ0k:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=HyOfv8nL0dE:IzNkiL6IZ0k:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=HyOfv8nL0dE:IzNkiL6IZ0k:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=HyOfv8nL0dE:IzNkiL6IZ0k:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=HyOfv8nL0dE:IzNkiL6IZ0k:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=HyOfv8nL0dE:IzNkiL6IZ0k:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=HyOfv8nL0dE:IzNkiL6IZ0k:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=HyOfv8nL0dE:IzNkiL6IZ0k:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/HyOfv8nL0dE" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="vmworldlabimage.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/assets_c/2010/09/vmworldlabimage-thumb-150x62-21642.jpg" width="150" height="62"/a href="http://vmworld.com"VMworld/a set up a a href="http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/labs/"lab/a this year that ran a hybrid cloud./p pThe VMware team set up a data center at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco that connected to public clouds provided by a href="http://terremark.com"Terremark/a in Miami and a href="http://www.verizonbusiness.com/#/our_vision"Verizon/a in Ashburn, Va./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21690amp;cb=21690' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21690amp;n=21690' border='0' alt='' //a/p pThe hybrid cloud was redundant so if it went down, the load could be picked up elsewhere./p pThis was the first year that VMworld used a hybrid cloud environment. They called it Lab Cloud. The numbers demonstrate the difference in what can be accomplished in a multi-tenant environment./p pLast year, there were 4,500 labs completed at VMword. This year there were more than 15,000 labs done./p pLab Cloud deployed and destroyed about 4000 Virtual Machines on a per hour basis. In total, Lab Cloud deployed a total of 145,097 virtual machines. Private cloud environments can not usually handle this kind of load, showing again the capabilities of what can be done when data centers and public cloud environments are connected./p pobject width="640" height="385"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/qCQbVpckCPccolor1=0xb1b1b1color2=0xd0d0d0hl=en_USfeature=player_embeddedfs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/qCQbVpckCPccolor1=0xb1b1b1color2=0xd0d0d0hl=en_USfeature=player_embeddedfs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="640" height="385"/embed/object/p pTo be fair, it is important to remember that this is a lab environment. The Lab Cloud was built from scratch. Any enterprise environment will face any number of obstacles in setting up a hybrid environment./p pOne thing it does show is the volume of virtual machines that are being spun into the cloud. The Lab Cloud demonstrated how much more extended a cloud environment can be compared to a traditional data center operation or a private cloud./p pIt also shows how VMware plans to do training at future VMworld events. VMware set up 480 seats for doing labs. Each lab took about an hour to do. A few people complete all of the labs. But more so, it helped give attendees hands-on experience in how to manage thousands of virtual machines that are being deployed and destroyed throughout a work day. /p pimg alt="vmworldlabs.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/assets_c/2010/09/vmworldlabs-thumb-500x333-21650.jpg" width="500" height="333"//p psmallsmallSource: a href="http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/08/29/vmworld-2010-labs-are-the-place-to-be/"Yellow Bricks/a/small/small/p pThe enterprise needs this kind of training for a few reasons. Hybrid cloud computing is still very new to most people. The labs give people a chance to learn new skills that will be needed as enterprise operations evolve toward a hybrid cloud computing environment. br / br / And perhaps just as much, it shows the IT knowledge worker the possibilities that the cloud brings to their work./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/09/what-the-vmworld-labs-demonstr.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/FpFcXRq-Qb6GvG1rOS_XbN8qf0M/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/FpFcXRq-Qb6GvG1rOS_XbN8qf0M/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/FpFcXRq-Qb6GvG1rOS_XbN8qf0M/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/FpFcXRq-Qb6GvG1rOS_XbN8qf0M/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=kcM6D2C203g:w31jn5ttn8s:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=kcM6D2C203g:w31jn5ttn8s:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=kcM6D2C203g:w31jn5ttn8s:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=kcM6D2C203g:w31jn5ttn8s:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=kcM6D2C203g:w31jn5ttn8s:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=kcM6D2C203g:w31jn5ttn8s:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=kcM6D2C203g:w31jn5ttn8s:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=kcM6D2C203g:w31jn5ttn8s:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=kcM6D2C203g:w31jn5ttn8s:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=kcM6D2C203g:w31jn5ttn8s:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=kcM6D2C203g:w31jn5ttn8s:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/kcM6D2C203g" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="pirate_bay_logo_aug09.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/pirate_bay_logo_aug09.png" width="120" height="121" class="mt-image-none" style="" /Authorities cracked down on file-sharing sites across Europe yesterday in a major operation two years in the making, Swedish officials a href="http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2010/09/20109719310578178.html"told/a media./p pThe raid is getting special attention because one target in Stockholm is best known for hosting part of a href="http://Wikileaks.org"Wikileaks.org/a, the site where whistle-blowers have leaked highly sensitive documents from governments across the world. But authorities said the real target was not Wikileaks, but the highly-active pirate network known as The Scene or Warez Scene, which encompasses 48 sites./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21694amp;cb=21694' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21694amp;n=21694' border='0' alt='' //a/p pSeven locations were raided in Sweden, a href="http://torrentfreak.com/police-in-file-sharing-raids-across-europe-wikileaks-host-targeted-100907/"according to/a the file-sharing news site Torrent Freak, including a university. Raids were also reportedly carried out in the Netherlands, Norway, Germany, the U.K., the Czech Republic, Hungary and Belgium, where the request originated. /p pSeveral torrent sites including Pirate Bay were down for users in some countries today./p pFive policemen showed up yesterday morning at PRQ, the company that in part hosts Wikileaks, and asked about two IP addresses used in 2009. The company handed over email addresses associated with the IP addresses, which are the only records it keeps on its clients. No servers or computers were confiscated, the company said./p pThe raid comes as Wikileaks is preparing to release 15,000 classified documents related to the war in Afghanistan, which the U.S. government is anxious to prevent. PRQ denied that Wikileaks was the subject of the raid, and Wikileaks has not made any statement yet./p p"The raid was about the usual file-sharing crack-down, which they have each year, so not directed directly against PRQ or its customers," PRQ said in an email to customers./p pThe extent and precise targeting of the raid suggest that it was a dedicated effort to crack down on piracy. The fact that one of Wikileaks' hosts was targeted could be a coincidence because Wikileaks and file-sharing sites have similar requirements: security and bravery in the face of international law enforcement./p pBut stranger conspiracy theories regarding Wikileaks have been proposed. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is a href="http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/rape-charges-a-set-up-says-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange/story-e6frf7lf-1225915801506"claiming/a rape charges filed against him in Sweden are part of a smear campaign orchestrated by the U.S. government./p pWhat do you think - was Wikileaks a target here?/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikileaks_involved_in_piracy_raid.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/8ULiP441SKBrnePQq1T8cb_0JdM/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/8ULiP441SKBrnePQq1T8cb_0JdM/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/8ULiP441SKBrnePQq1T8cb_0JdM/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/8ULiP441SKBrnePQq1T8cb_0JdM/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=w-jKorbpUc0:ZYsTWp-ih5A:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=w-jKorbpUc0:ZYsTWp-ih5A:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=w-jKorbpUc0:ZYsTWp-ih5A:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=w-jKorbpUc0:ZYsTWp-ih5A:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=w-jKorbpUc0:ZYsTWp-ih5A:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=w-jKorbpUc0:ZYsTWp-ih5A:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=w-jKorbpUc0:ZYsTWp-ih5A:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=w-jKorbpUc0:ZYsTWp-ih5A:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=w-jKorbpUc0:ZYsTWp-ih5A:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=w-jKorbpUc0:ZYsTWp-ih5A:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=w-jKorbpUc0:ZYsTWp-ih5A:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/w-jKorbpUc0" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="mozilla-labs-logo-mar09.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/mozilla-labs-logo-mar09.png" width="145" height="32" class="mt-image-none" style="" /Mozilla announced a href="http://mozillalabs.com/gaming/"Mozilla Labs Gaming/a today, a push to get developers to make use of new Open Web technologies to build "awesome games" that can be played in a Web browser./p pThe move was timed to coincide with the latest a href="http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/09/07/firefox-4-beta-with-faster-graphics-and-new-audio-capabilities-for-the-web/"update/a to Firefox 4, now in beta development, which promises better graphics and a new application programming interface (API) that will let developers read and write raw audio data in the browser. Together, the two announcements are aimed to let users and developers know there are still reasons to be pumped about the Web in this age of native apps./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21692amp;cb=21692' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21692amp;n=21692' border='0' alt='' //a/p pimg alt="mozilla-labs-gaming.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/mozilla-labs-gaming.jpg" width="161" height="102" class="mt-image-right" style="float: right; margin: 0 0 20px 20px;" /"Modern Open Web technologies introduced a complete stack of technologies such as Open Video, audio, WebGL, touch events, device orientation, geo location, and fast JavaScript engines which make it possible to build complex (and not so complex) games on the Web," Mozilla Labs a href="http://mozillalabs.com/gaming/2010/09/07/welcome-to-mozilla-labs-gaming/"wrote/a on its blog. "With these technologies being delivered through modern browsers today, the time is ripe for pushing the platform. And what better way than through games?"/p pMozilla neglected to explain how these games will be distributed, a crucial detail for developers. Will there be a Firefox store similar to Google's Web app store, the Chrome Web Store? If so, will developers be able to charge money for these games?/p pMozilla did announce an international game developer competition, a href="https://gaming.mozillalabs.com/"Game On 2010/a, to open at the end of September. It's likely that the cash-flush Mozilla Foundation will put up some prize money for the best Web games./p pimg alt="firefox-audio-api.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/firefox-audio-api.jpg" width="469" height="333" class="mt-image-center" style="text-align: center; display: block; margin: 0 auto 20px;" /emFirefox's new audio API introduces new possibilities for game developers./em/p pMozilla hasn't explicitly pushed Firefox as the place to play all these fantastic new games, citing only "modern browsers." But the improvements to Firefox 4 suggest that's what it's thinking. It's possible that Mozilla expects developers who are inspired by this announcement simply list their games in the a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore"Chrome Web Store/a, which lists apps that can work in browsers other than Chrome. /p pWe're guessing that driving developers to the Chrome Web Store is not what Mozilla is thinking. But it sounds like games are really a means to an end here. Magazines are writing stories about how the a href="http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1"Web is dead/a and consumers and developers are flocking to native mobile apps. Mozilla wants to spread the word about what's possible in the Web browser./p pWe'll be paying close attention to see what details Mozilla reveals about the competition and its vision for the future of the browser-centric Web. /p pAre native apps really where it's at? What do you see in the browser's future, and do you think Web games are a good way to get there?/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mozilla_using_games_to_push_html_5_javascript_and.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/nIQUhPRCZfmn1KfUIfz_MoHrj8E/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/nIQUhPRCZfmn1KfUIfz_MoHrj8E/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/nIQUhPRCZfmn1KfUIfz_MoHrj8E/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/nIQUhPRCZfmn1KfUIfz_MoHrj8E/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=5yGy09ErUPs:8IKasJgIQyQ:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=5yGy09ErUPs:8IKasJgIQyQ:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=5yGy09ErUPs:8IKasJgIQyQ:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=5yGy09ErUPs:8IKasJgIQyQ:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=5yGy09ErUPs:8IKasJgIQyQ:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=5yGy09ErUPs:8IKasJgIQyQ:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=5yGy09ErUPs:8IKasJgIQyQ:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=5yGy09ErUPs:8IKasJgIQyQ:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=5yGy09ErUPs:8IKasJgIQyQ:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=5yGy09ErUPs:8IKasJgIQyQ:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=5yGy09ErUPs:8IKasJgIQyQ:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/5yGy09ErUPs" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://readwriteweb.com/images/iraqwiki-20100907-175520.jpg" alt="iraqwiki"/emAbove: Boutique book publisher and geek a href="http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/"James Bridle/a has printed the 12,000 edits made to the controversial Wikipedia entry for a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War"Iraq War/a between December 2004 to November 2009 as a 7,000 page, 12 volume set of books./em/p blockquote"This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification. p"And for the first time in history, we're building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future." -James Bridle/blockquote/p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21693amp;cb=21693' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21693amp;n=21693' border='0' alt='' //a/p pBridle spoke about the project in his talk "The Value of Ruins" at the a href="http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/james-bridle"dConstruct conference/a last week in Brighton, England. Audio of his talk is posted below. /p pOf the printed collection, Bridle says: "It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes 'Saddam Hussein was a dickhead'."/p pOf Wikipedia, Bridle says: "It's not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot."/p pI think that's pretty awesome. /p pBelow: Bridle's talk at dConstruct, The Value of Ruins. Audio thanks to the wonderful podcast curation tool a href="http://HuffDuffer.com"HuffDuffer/a. (Which, incidentally, was built by Jeremy Keith, author of a href="http://books.alistapart.com/products/html5-for-web-designers"HTML5 for Web Designers/a, who a href="http://twitter.com/adactio/status/23858853720"recently shook hands with James Bridle himself/a.)/p pobject type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://huffduffer.com/flash/player.swf?soundFile=http://dconstruct.s3.amazonaws.com/2010/podcast/dconstruct2010-bridle.mp3" width="290" height="24"param name="movie" value="http://huffduffer.com/flash/player.swf?soundFile=http://dconstruct.s3.amazonaws.com/2010/podcast/dconstruct2010-bridle.mp3" /param name="wmode" value="transparent" /a href="http://huffduffer.com/dConstruct/25256"The Value Of Ruins on Huffduffer/a/object/p pimg src="http://readwriteweb.com/images/iraqwar-20100907-165101.jpg" alt="iraqwar"//p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/man_turns_single_wikipedia_page_into_beautiful_12.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vB28yzI37dGMm_H0W5X91mf9-Lo/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vB28yzI37dGMm_H0W5X91mf9-Lo/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vB28yzI37dGMm_H0W5X91mf9-Lo/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vB28yzI37dGMm_H0W5X91mf9-Lo/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=oFJj9Mtu_-Q:VEJqg2VAGrc:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=oFJj9Mtu_-Q:VEJqg2VAGrc:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=oFJj9Mtu_-Q:VEJqg2VAGrc:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=oFJj9Mtu_-Q:VEJqg2VAGrc:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=oFJj9Mtu_-Q:VEJqg2VAGrc:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=oFJj9Mtu_-Q:VEJqg2VAGrc:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=oFJj9Mtu_-Q:VEJqg2VAGrc:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=oFJj9Mtu_-Q:VEJqg2VAGrc:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=oFJj9Mtu_-Q:VEJqg2VAGrc:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=oFJj9Mtu_-Q:VEJqg2VAGrc:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=oFJj9Mtu_-Q:VEJqg2VAGrc:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/oFJj9Mtu_-Q" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="censorship.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/censorship.jpg" width="130" height="200" /Anyone who writes on a specific topic will have a set of resources he or she refers to in order to keep on top of what's happening. Those of us who keep an eye out on how free speech issues affect the online world tend to use resources that are, of course, online. Practicing the transparency we preach, I thought it might be useful to share my top sources. /p pThe criteria I used to come up with this list of 10 online free speech sources are that they need to be accessible to anyone, provide original news or original analysis of that news and be frequently updated. In this list I have focused on institutional resources./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21687amp;cb=21687' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21687amp;n=21687' border='0' alt='' //a/p pimg alt="rsf.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/rsf.png" width="247" height="79" class="alignright" /stronga href="http://en.rsf.org/internet.html"Reporters Without Borders - Internet/a/strong RSF (as its known in French) was the first press freedom group to pay attention to the non-journalist, non-activist bloggers who were increasingly getting into legal trouble for speaking online. They're probably currently the best source on online threats internationally, with a lot of in-country intel. /p pstronga href="http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/"Global Voices - Advocacy GVO/a/strong leverages an international group of native respondents to cover issues of importance to the non-English speaking blogosphere (are we still using that term?). The leverage that group in turn to keep track of bloggers, and other users of social media, who have fallen afoul of the law. /p pimg alt="eff_privacy.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/eff_privacy.jpg" width="150" height="150" class="alignleft" /stronga href="http://www.eff.org/"Electronic Frontier Foundation/a/strong This U.S. group is focused on the legal element of electronic speech. They are not just reporters and analysts. Their active cadre of lawyers are frequently actors in lawsuits to keep in the Internet open. /p pstronga href="http://opennet.net/blog"OpenNetInitiative/a/strong Famous for their studies of filtering mechanisms and technology use in countries around the world, the ONI blog keeps intelligent track of news and trends in free speech. /p pstronga href="http://mlrcblogsuits.blogspot.com/"MLRC: Legal Actions Against Bloggers/a/strong Focusing on the U.S. legal landscape, the Media Law Resource Center's blog details "legal cases . . . in which bloggers have been sued for libel, privacy and related claims, or been subject to criminal investigations or prosecutions."/p pimg alt="neteffect.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/neteffect.jpg" width="270" height="70" class="alignright" /stronga href="http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/"Net Effect/a/strong Foreign Policy magazine's online speech blog, Net Effect is written by Evgeny Morozov, as wrong and dumb as he is right and smart (and he's right and smart a lot). Morozov has a distinctive point of view on events and trends online, one powered by more of a geopolitical context than most resources. Whether your agree with him (you won't) or disagree (you won't), there's usually something to think about, and sometimes news. He doesn't post as often as he should. /p pstronga href="http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights"Wired - Online Rights/a/strong Wired.com's listing of stories on electronic communications freedoms and threats to them come from across the magazine's contents. Some stories have exceptional analysis by thinkers in the middle of the stories. /p pimg alt="cpj.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cpj.jpg" width="150" height="152" class="alignleft" /stronga href="http://cpj.org/news/"Committee to Protect Journalists - Alerts/a/strong The Committee to Protect Journalists was very late to the table in covering online issues, but their long experience dealing with threatened journalists and the contacts they have partially make up for it. A particularly good resource for overall free speech context in a region. /p pstronga href="http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=7"Freedom House - Newsroom/a/strong Also good for overall context, Freedom House also produces intelligent reports on issues including online free speech trends. /p pThese are the institutional resources I find myself using the most. In the future I may list the personal blogs I use the most, as well as the Twitter accounts from which I get the most useful information. In the meantime, how do you stay informed on free speech issues that affect you online? /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_online_free_speech_resources.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/5C3aR4ZwIihpLNZMaAcRcNjkr4w/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/5C3aR4ZwIihpLNZMaAcRcNjkr4w/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/5C3aR4ZwIihpLNZMaAcRcNjkr4w/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/5C3aR4ZwIihpLNZMaAcRcNjkr4w/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=KYpoqLoZSwc:VEty2sk9VIk:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=KYpoqLoZSwc:VEty2sk9VIk:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=KYpoqLoZSwc:VEty2sk9VIk:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=KYpoqLoZSwc:VEty2sk9VIk:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=KYpoqLoZSwc:VEty2sk9VIk:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=KYpoqLoZSwc:VEty2sk9VIk:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=KYpoqLoZSwc:VEty2sk9VIk:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=KYpoqLoZSwc:VEty2sk9VIk:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=KYpoqLoZSwc:VEty2sk9VIk:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=KYpoqLoZSwc:VEty2sk9VIk:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=KYpoqLoZSwc:VEty2sk9VIk:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/KYpoqLoZSwc" height="1" width="1"/