Our poll this week asks: Which tool do you mostly use for word processing?. We’ve had a great response, with 837 unique votes so far. The results are very much in favor of desktop word processing tools, which is a little surprising considering the early adopter readership of Read/WriteWeb. Microsoft Word has 47% of the … Read more

Daniel Langendorf at last100 has written an outstanding post, explaining how (if done right) the Gphone and not the iPhone will be the one to change the face of the wireless industry. The post has accompanying graphics – Gphone concepts contributed by Lorin Wood, a previsualization designer who specializes in concepts and ideation for Hollywood. … Read more

This is Web Office Week here at Read/WriteWeb, but some of you may not be 100% sure what a Web Office is. Even the Wikipedia definition is a bit bare bones, so in this post I’m going to take a crack at defining ‘Web Office’. What I ended up with is this: A Web Office … Read more

Slide, which makes slideshow and media widgets for the major social network platforms (including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Xanga, Tagged and Blogger) has announced that more than a million new flash widgets are being added to its network every day. Its most popular widgets are Slideshows, SkinFlix, Guestbooks and FunPix. Slide is very popular on … Read more

I never thought one of our network sites would be outed by Valleywag, but that’s what happened today 🙂 I’m pleased to introduce Read/WriteTalk, a brand new podcasting show produced by Sean Ammirati and myself. Sean is the driving force behind the show, so all credit goes to him for setting it up and doing … Read more

One of the leading RSS Aggregation startups, NewsGator Technologies, jumped on the Facebook bandwagon today with NewsFriends (add to Facebook here) – a social news application where Facebook users can aggregate and share news, videos and podcasts. Once you have it installed, you can select friends and it automatically delivers you the news they are … Read more

This poll is about the Web Office, our feature this week. We’re looking to find out your current word processing habits – have they changed much now that online word processing is an option? Not wanting to sway the poll results, but currently I use browser-based word processors much more than desktop ones. I find … Read more

This week Read/WriteWeb will be featuring a series of posts about the Web Office. Let’s start by summarizing what exactly is a Web Office. In a June post we mentioned that a Web Office suite should have, at the least, the following apps in it: email, calendar, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations. These are the core … Read more

Tonight Bloglines is launching a new design at beta.bloglines.com, which includes a new personalizable Start Page, more views, and drag and drop Ajax functionality. I spoke to new Bloglines GM Eric Engleman about the makeover and tested the Beta Bloglines myself. My judgement below, plus I re-cap the history of Bloglines and how they dropped … Read more

The Ajax version of Yahoo Mail has finally had its beta tag removed and is now the default interface for all Yahoo Mail accounts. The new service includes two interesting real-time communication features: 1) Free text messaging to mobile phone numbers (but only available in the US, Canada, India and the Philippines); 2) Integrated instant … Read more

Recently Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, has been throwing out warning signals about the Internet. He told the BBC that poor security and poor software design are undermining the reliability of the internet. In particular he mentioned Operating Systems and browsers: “The biggest hole we have is with internet browsers, … Read more

Mark Cuban says the Internet is dead and boring, but Fred Wilson says it isn’t for him! Who’s right? Well, both of them. Let me quickly explain (before you get bored with what is actually a fairly pointless argument). Cuban wrote: “Some people have tried to make the point that Web 2.0 is proof that … Read more

The Attention Economy is a marketplace where consumers agree to receive services in exchange for their attention. Examples include personalized news, personalized search, alerts and recommendations to buy. Note that the Attention Economy is different from the tradional meaning of an economy, because it isn’t about buying and selling – although ultimately those things may … Read more

This week we’re trying something new with the format of the Weekly Wrapup. Instead of listing all of the posts we published over the past week, we’ll filter them so you just get the best posts. The idea is that this will make good weekend reading, because it’ll be highlighting the best content of the … Read more

As a follow-up from our post earlier today – The Web 2.0 Election: Does the Internet Matter in Election Politics? – The Washington Post is reporting that online “friends” could be pivotal in the 2008 U.S. race. But it seems Democrats have a big advantage on popular social networks: “Democrats outnumber Republicans 5-to-1 on Facebook … Read more