Just a quick update to this week’s poll, which is already rocking. The question is: What is your favorite online music streaming service? Right now last.fm and Pandora are nearly neck and neck in the vote, followed by Yahoo Music. But a couple of updates to the poll: 1) We added FineTune and Live365, as … Read more

This week’s poll complements our special series on Online Music. We’re asking what is your number 1 favorite music streaming service on the Web. With this poll there are bound to be sites that aren’t on the list, but which are somebody’s favorite. We’ve included as many of the major services as we could remember, … Read more

Every week we have a feature called Read/WriteWeb Files, in which we investigate a current hot topic or company in Web technology. This week we’re going to focus on Online Music, something that is becoming more and more prevelant as broadband speed increases and social software functionality gets better. Our network blog on digital lifestyle, … Read more

A New Zealand-based social network, iYomu, is launching globally today with a US$1 Million challenge. iYomu is branding itself as a “social networking website for grown-ups” and the site is restricted to those over 18 years old. The name of the site, iYomu, stands for “I, You, Me and Us”. Its aim is to provide … Read more

The Google Operating System blog noted that Sun’s StarOffice suite of productivity tools has been added to the free Google Pack offering. StarOffice is a direct competitor to Microsoft Office, as it is a full suite of desktop-based office apps that normally retails for $70. It includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing and database. It … Read more

Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email. Also our sister site last100 has a Weekly Wrapup too. R/WW Files: Personalizing Google This week’s feature series was on Google’s efforts to implement personalization … Read more

Online classifieds startup edgeio has just launched a new paid content product, which will be of particular interest to online publishers and media producers. They’re calling it “transactional classifieds”, which is an awkward name for a potentially very useful e-commerce service. Other terms being bandied around to promote this are “distributed commerce” (better) and “peer … Read more

Today ‘human-powered’ search engine Mahalo is launching a new Firefox toolbar, which has some unique functionality that could potentially convert users from Google Search, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com and other major search engines. The new toolbar, once installed into Firefox (IE version is due in September), displays a sidebar every time you do a search on … Read more

Today Microsoft announcedWindows Live SkyDrive, the final product name for its online storage solution – previously known as Windows Live Folders. Windows Live SkyDrive has a few new features and enhanced UI, in line with upcoming changes across other Windows Live services. Windows Live SkyDrive offers users 500MB of web space for storing and sharing … Read more

As part of our Personalizing Google Week, we conducted an email interview with Google’s Sep Kamvar, who is Lead Software Engineer for Personalization at Google. Sep was the founder of Kaltix, a search engine that was acquired by Google in 2003 and is thought to be the basis of Google’s current personalization efforts. Here is … Read more

What’s this? IBM going media 2.0? Big Blue has released a Noir-themed report entitled ‘Navigating the Media Divide: Innovating and Enabling New Business Models.’ It comes with a movie inspired design and pitch: “Traditional and new media are clashing. The old rules on content and distribution: gone. Traditional alliances: unreliable. Long-established partnerships: threatened. Everything’s changing. … Read more

Since French startup Zlio opened in the US in February, it has been busy making alliances with US companies (and annoying Amazon.com too). Zlio is a service that enables any Internet user to start a virtual store and populate it with products from a number of merchants. Zlio automatically figures out which of their merchant … Read more

The rumor tonight is that social shopping service Kaboodle has been acquired for $30M+ by Hearst. We profiled Kaboodle and other social shopping services back in December in our Social Shopping Faceoff. Our conclusion then was that Kaboodle leads the social shopping pack, with a clean UI and the most comprehensive feature set. It also … Read more

Web office vendor Dabble DB has jumped on the Facebook bandwagon and launched a “social to-do list” called Dabble Do. You can get it on Facebook here. How is it social, I hear you ask? Basically you can assign items not only to yourself, but to your friends – and be kept up-to-date on their … Read more

In Greg Linden’s guest post defining Web personalization, he notes that Google Personalized Search uses technology acquired in 2003 from a small startup named Kaltix. He goes on to say that “the current version of Google Personalized Search learns from your search queries. Searchers do not have to do anything explicitly to use it; it … Read more