Metalink is a new technology that makes it easier and faster to get large files. It’s kind of like a playlist for such files (they can be FTP, HTTP, or P2P), because it stores multiple file locations in a single file – and then the download proceeds according to a set of rules. The Wikipedia … Read more

Interesting development from Microsoft – and one that makes perfect sense given their media device strengths (a.k.a. stranglehold over the OS). Microsoft has released a Windows Live for TV beta. The project is code-named “Orbit” and it is built on the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Windows Live for TV will connect people via a Vista … Read more

div for entry content including hero As we all know, web statistics are an unreliable thing at the best of times. I posted on this issue back in March 2006, noting that Urchin and web server stats can be used by people to grossly exaggerate their statistics. Well now Nik Cubrilovic has posted on a … Read more

Forrester Research has done a usability comparison between RIA (Rich Internet Apps) and HTML apps, in a report entitled Smackdown: Rich Internet Applications Versus HTML. The result: “We looked for examples of rich Internet and HTML applications in each of four categories and compared how well they supported relevant user goals. We found that, on … Read more

When I was looking for submissions for Best Web Companies and Innovators of 2006, a R/WW commenter pointed to a non-profit site called kiva.org – calling it “web 2.0 meets the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize”. Kiva.org lets you loan money to an entrepreneur in the developing world. On the homepage there is a list of … Read more

Disclosure: Eurekster is a sponsor of Read/WriteWeb Eurekster has quietly rolled out an interesting upgrade to their social search service, Swicki. Now users can contribute their own search answers to a swicki, if they feel they have expertise in the topic. This essentially makes Swicki into a ‘read/write’ search engine! The owner of the swicki … Read more

To usher in the new year, we’re very pleased to announce the new Read/WriteWeb Job Board – brought to you in association with JobThread. While there are a few prominent and excellent job boards run by other tech blogs, there are a couple of differentiating factors with ours: 1) It’s less expensive! $100 for a … Read more

Just before Christmas, Mozilla designer Alex Faaborg published some introductory posts on his blog about where Mozilla is headed with microformats. Quick background: Mozilla is of course the developer of the popular open source browser Firefox; and microformats are (in Alex’s words) “adding semantics to markup to take it from being machine readable to being … Read more

Written by Berislav Lopac and edited by Richard MacManus Croatia is a small market for any industry – and especially when it comes to the Internet. It has about 4.5 million citizens, but only 35% of them regularly used the Internet in 2005, according to a recent study by IDC. However, the same study tells … Read more

Last week we published a list of web technology predictions for 2007, along with a poll asking which trend you think will be *the* biggest of 2007. Social networks dominated the Web scene in 2006, so what will be the equivalent in 2007? We’ve had 1,235 votes so far (but we’ll leave the poll open … Read more

It’s a light posting week here on R/WW – but for those of you not out enjoying the xmas/new year break, here is a list of Read/WriteWeb’s most popular posts in 2006. This is according to our server logs. But honestly, you really should be reading a good book instead of blogs at this time … Read more

This is the third annual Best Web Companies round-up from Read/WriteWeb (ref: 2005 and 2004). This year we’re spreading it out over 2 separate posts and this is the second one – see yesterday’s post for Best BigCo of 2006. Best Web LittleCo It was a very hard decision this year, for a few reasons. … Read more

Yahoo has come up with a way to mix social networking with charities and non-profits. Called Yahoo! For Good, it has partnered with ‘charity aggregator’ Network for Good and launched a personalized Charity Badge – for people to put on their websites, social networks or email. To promote the initiative, Yahoo! will match the amount … Read more

This is the third annual Best Web Companies round-up from Read/WriteWeb (see 2005 and 2004). This year we’re spreading it out over 2 separate posts. In this post, we announce Best Bigco and the runners-up – with our special brand of analysis too. In our next post, we’ll announce Best Web LittleCo of 2006 and … Read more

Written by Richard MacManus, Ebrahim Ezzy, Emre Sokullu, Alex Iskold and Rudy De Waele. Also John Milan wanted to contribute, but unfortunately got caught up in the Seattle storm – so best wishes to John and all our Seattle readers. In our previous post we reviewed the Web trends of 2006, noting trends such as … Read more