Blastfeed is the latest in RSS filter products to cross my virtual desk. Back in April I looked at this space and at the time noted that filtering would be a hot topic in 2006. Why? Because it’s the next step up from RSS aggregation, as many of us now have too much information coming … Read more

Searchfeed.com is one of a large group of so-called “second tier” PPC (Pay-Per-Click) search advertising networks – others include Kanoodle, InfoSeek, and Looksmart. SearchEngineWatch lists some more on this page (nb: it’s 3 years old, but I couldn’t find a more up-to-date list). The first tier services are Google AdWords and Overture – in which … Read more

Just a quick admin note about a few things. Firstly, Read/WriteWeb has been growing so well in recent months that I’m in the process of expanding the site. Key to this is continuing to provide premium content on web technology – and building a community around that. So I want to thank all the regular … Read more

Increasingly marketing firms are using popular social networks on the Web as part of their campaigns – creating fake user profiles to sell their products. On one hand this is not a good thing for social networks, because the last thing they want is to be clogged up with marketing campaigns masquerading as users in … Read more

It’s going to be a busy month or two for Microsoft, as the business launch of Windows Vista and Office 2007 is set for November 30 and there are a number of complementary initiatives that will see the light of day soon. One is the Expression suite of web design tools. Expression Web is part … Read more

Ultrastar is a music fan site management company, started by David Bowie in the late 90’s. They create and manage sites for a range of pop music acts – such as The Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Sting, INXS and about 9 other acts. They emailed me today to tell me … Read more

Holotof is a network of “advertising creatives”, which enables businesses to come and pitch them work – in the form of ad projects and campaigns. The idea then is that creatives submit ideas for the pitch and the client chooses the best one to work with. The site was launched in May this year by … Read more

While in San Francisco earlier this month, I met up with Laszlo’s Founder and CTO, David Temkin, along with CMO Kent Libbey. Laszlo has an open source Ajax application development platform called OpenLaszlo – which has been used for external apps like Pandora (online radio and music sharing) and ishares.com (Barclays sharemarket app). OpenLaszlo was … Read more

Lloyd Sakazaki has written a good overview of recent trends in global websites. It is based on Alexa data, a stats source which comes under regular fire for its faults (most recently ex-Netscape boss Jason Calacanis took aim). Nevertheless, there are some interesting underlying trends in the Seeking Alpha article. Not new trends, but well … Read more

Interesting podcast interview by Gizbuzz, with Jen Mazzon and Sam Schillace of the Google Docs and Spreadsheets team (both ex-Writely). They start off by saying that D&S is aimed at “people who need to collaborate and share their stuff online”. To the question of whether people are using it instead of desktop apps (such as … Read more

Our post this week about GoogleOS led to some vigorous and fascinating discussion in Read/WriteWeb. 87 mostly thoughtful comments were left here, plus many more on Slashdot and Digg. To get a final, more succinct, picture of whether R/WW readers expect to see a GoogleOS – here is a poll for you. I hope there … Read more

Written by Dejan Bizinger, a web manager at Serbian media company B92.net, and edited by Richard MacManus Serbia is a country located in Southeast Europe with around 9 million people. Around 1.5 million Serbians use the Internet and the majority of them are still dial-up users. The main reasons for the small broadband penetration are … Read more

I know, a predictable (almost tabloid-y) blog headline. But in this case, there really is some interesting back and forth going on between Microsoft and Google currently – especially with regards to office software. Firstly Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote an article for The Economist, in which he takes aim at Microsoft with this: “In … Read more

On my ZDNet blog last night I took a look at the evolving world of Web Office widgets. I noted that the personalized start page Pageflakes has just introduced a couple of new office “flakes” – a Calendar Flake and a Notepad Flake. They also have an existing Mail Flake, as well as flakes for … Read more

Along with the increasing internationalization of the Web, comes the language challenge. China is obviously a key Web and business market going forward, so there is currently a lot of interest in learning Mandarin. As one solution to this, Ken Carroll recently contacted me to tell me about ChinesePod – the site he co-founded a … Read more