Adam Carstens from the Attention Company emailed today to tell me about some new research they’ve just published. It’s a report entitled “Out There” and surveys the attitudes of people who participate in online communities. Here is the report as a PDF. I’d not heard of them before, but the Attention Company is made up … Read more

Web metrics firm Compete has an interesting post, outlining the top 20 websites (for US traffic). According to Compete, all 20 of them got over 20 million unique visitors in October 2006. Here is the chart: A couple of people noted in the comments that if you add Microsoft’s 4 top 20 properties together (msn.com, … Read more

While looking through Mary Meeker’s 2006 Web 2.0 Summit presentation, I was struck by the figures on page 19: “Peer-to-Peer (P2P) traffic was 60% (and rising) of Internet traffic in 2004, with BitTorrent accounting for 30% of traffic, per CacheLogic”. You can definitely see why this is the case, as P2P is normally used to … Read more

Today Microsoft released a beta of Live Search Books, its competitor to Google Book Search. The content inside Live Search Books isn’t that modern – it basically only includes out-of-copyright books. As the Live Search team noted, this release “makes tens of thousands of out-of-copyright books available from our library scanning initiative, including books from … Read more

Online video sharing sites are a dime a dozen these days, but a newly launched one caught my eye this week. Coull.tv promises to enable users to search inside videos – to find specific segments within a video that they want to view – as well as interact with “moving objects” inside the video. You … Read more

Zoho recently released a set of APIs that lets anyone write their own program to use Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet data [disclosure: Zoho is a sponsor of Read/WriteWeb]. As Matthew Ingram explained, it “means that other companies — online storage providers such as Box.net, Carbonite or Mozy, for example — can easily build support … Read more

John Milan’s latest article for Read/WriteWeb explores the evolving software environment, with particular focus on Microsoft and Google. The article gets us to thinking: is Google the latest manifestation of an Internet bubble, or is it really different this time? Although comparing two different decades is a little dangerous, perhaps even silly, we can’t help … Read more

Recently I came across a new magazine that is delivered via the Web – and utilizes a lot of Web native functionality in the process. It’s called Avantoure and the tagline is “life is a game”. The contents of the magazine appeal to me, but in this post I’ll focus mainly on the web technologies … Read more

Via Geekzone comes news of a 3D shopping mall, called The Mall Plus, that has just been released in New Zealand. After seeing this, memories of the mid to late 90’s came flooding back to me – a time when websites built on real world metaphors filled the Web landscape. For example the very first … Read more

An interesting update to our post earlier this week about fake Social Network user profiles, created for marketing purposes. A Flickr forum thread states that the Red Passion user (the one referenced in our post, representing a marketing campaign for a beverages company) has now been terminated. Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield made this comment in … Read more

Yahoo has announced an event around Predictive Markets, called confab.yahoo. It’s described as an “open micro-conference series” and is being run by Yahoo!’s Technology Development Group. The reason it caught my eye was this: “We started confab.yahoo because we want to push the web and its applications up to the next level. After slightly more … Read more

Recent Google acquisition JotSpot found itself the subject of unwanted attention this week, when an early customer complained of being shut out after the Google deal. A blog post by someone named Kevin (no last name supplied) had all the gory details, but Kevin then subsequently deleted it (note: I’d already read it before it … Read more

This week Yahoo has released some new initiatives and polished up the design of existing content properties. Here is R/WW’s summary of the action, along with some commentary… Yahoo TV re-design – and is Yahoo scaling back RSS? Yahoo TV has had a re-design, giving it a liberal sprinkling of Ajax and social Web features. … Read more

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced today the business availability of the Windows Vista operating system, the 2007 release of Microsoft Office, and other new business software offerings. Vista and Office 07 be available from 30 January. The OS and Office launches were described as “the beginning of the most significant product launch in company history”. … Read more

Orange Spain, a mobile operator, has two new music services – ‘New Talents’ and ‘Enjoy your Music’. Both are powered by Music Intelligence Solutions, a provider of AI (artificial intelligence) software for music recommendation and discovery. Music Intelligence Solutions is an intriguing company. It was founded in 2002 and is based in Spain and the … Read more