NOTE: Please see important update about this week’s R/WW Poll below, on the topic of Personalized Homepages. We had to re-set it and so are asking for you to re-submit your vote. Today Google launched 6 new themes for its Google Personalized Homepage. The themes to choose from include: a beach, a city, a sweet … Read more

We had an awesome response to our caption contest on Monday – over 80 comments! The Under The Radar folks and myself had a tough choice deciding… but the winner of the free ticket to the Under The Radar Office 2.0 conference, to be held this Friday March 23 at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain … Read more

Allth.at was one of the 100 top alternative search engines in Charles Knight’s February list. It’s a search agent that allows you to define a search topic, then refine it with the use of filters, and finally subscribe to it via email or RSS. It’s similar in many respects to PubSub, the now defunct ‘future … Read more

One of the more innovative web apps around has just gotten another big injection of funds, and a new CEO to boot. Zopa describes itself as a “marketplace for Social Lending”, where people lend and borrow money with each other – sidestepping the middleman, i.e. banks. They recently advertised for jobs in their new America … Read more

Disclosure: Userplane is a sponsor of Read/WriteWeb Userplane, the provider of community web apps that was acquired by AOL in August last year, is today releasing Userplane Userlist – a Flash-based instant messaging app that you can integrate into web sites. Basically Userlist enables users on a site to view other users’ online status and … Read more

On Tuesday Yahoo will significantly expand the reach of their new mobile search product, Yahoo! oneSearch, by making it the default mobile Yahoo homepage at http://m.yahoo.com for US users. In effect this brings oneSearch, which Yahoo launched in January 2007, to the Mobile Web masses. The US masses anyway – it will be rolled out … Read more

Update: Unfortunately we have had to re-set the poll, 12 hours after it went live, due to some suspicious voting behavior. We have now blocking repeat voters by Cookie and IP address (previously it was only cookie). We apologize for the inconvenience, but please cast your vote again. With the release of Netvibes’ latest version, … Read more

Read/WriteWeb has 1 free ticket to give away for the Under The Radar Office 2.0 conference, to be held on March 23 at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View. More details at the Under The Radar blog. The free ticket will be presented to the winner of this caption contest. To enter, simply provide a … Read more

Netvibes, one of the leading ‘personalized homepage’ products on the market, today officially released its new version – nicknamed the “Coriander Edition”. This edition has been under discussion for the past month on the Netvibes blog, but today it is being officially launched. Incidentally Netvibes is now using the term “super-personalized homepage” to describe itself … Read more

Well here I am joining a Techmeme scrum 😉 The big news today is that Michael Arrington announced a CEO for Techcrunch – Heather Harde, who is currently the SVP of Mergers and Acquisitions at Fox Interactive Media. This really does prove that blogs can be big business – it’s a heck of an achievement … Read more

Every Friday afternoon PST, Read/WriteWeb publishes a Weekly Wrapup of news, reviews and analysis from the past week. I know a lot of people are too busy with their jobs to keep up with Web tech news on a daily basis, so the Weekly Wrapup is the perfect opportunity for those people to catch up … Read more

Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Analysis Posts Google Interview This week Read/WriteWeb finally got an interview with Google, something I’ve been wanting for a long time. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam operations, talked to me on the topic of next-generation search. Unfortunately I published it just … Read more

sphereit start 13 months ago Read/WriteWeb published a review post about the leading “meme trackers” – i.e. sites that cluster and filter the latest tech news. My conclusion at that time was that Techmeme came out on top, closely followed by Tailrank and Topix.net. My summary back then: “All in all, Memeorandum still comes out … Read more

With the proliferation of online video (yes there is more than just YouTube out there!), the opportunity has arisen for portal players that provide a ‘one stop shop’ for online video. One such service is PureVideo, which has just released some new features. In fact it almost has too many features, because it’s hard to … Read more

A new website called We Dig TV is transforming TV game shows and re-making them for the internet. The site converts tv programs and formats into Internet tv shows, making them interactive and a two-way Web experience. As of now they have adapted 4 classic TV game shows and optimised them for broadband use – … Read more