As well as being reigning world football champions, Italy has a number of world class web apps. Yes, Italy is the 10th country to be profiled in Read/WriteWeb’s Top International Web Apps series. The others so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China and Turkey. For this post I have … Read more

Read/WriteWeb is growing. Last month was a record month in traffic, by a long shot. And after over 4 years of blogging, last month was also the first month I’ve managed to earn enough from R/WW to ‘pay’ for the time I spend writing and editing it. So R/WW is now a professional publication in … Read more

With the messy demise of PubSub, I’ve been looking for a decent keyword and topic subscription service to replace it. ZapTXT could very well meet my requirements, except for the odd fact that it doesn’t output in RSS (more on that below). You can currently only receive alerts as an email, IM or SMS. Other … Read more

There are a plethora of bookmarking sites out there and only a few of them have become very successful – del.icio.us and Stumbleupon are two that spring to mind. Trailfire is a bit different from your average bookmarking site, because they don’t just allow you to share bookmarks – they make it easy for you … Read more

Times Reader is an upcoming new application from The New York Times and Microsoft, which lets users read the NY Times electronically using advanced screen reading technology from Microsoft. The app is due to be launched as a free beta soon – an article about it is now available at the NY Times’ First Look … Read more

Just kidding… but now that I have your attention, here are some interesting Web Tech tidbits: Amazon aStore is a new product from Amazon that enables you “to build a dedicated shopping area that can be embedded within, or linked to from, your website.” Mitch Ratcliffe and Nick Carr have examples and good thoughts on … Read more

I recently had the pleasure of talking to Opera‘s Chief Technology Officer Håkon Wium Lie. We spoke about Microsoft’s latest web browser IE7 and Håkon was harshly critical of it, as well as Microsoft’s past history with CSS and web standards. Bear in mind that Opera competes with IE and also that Håkon has a … Read more

With all this talk of the Web as a platform, it’s worth taking a closer look at what web apps are using Firefox as their platform. Firefox is regarded as the best Web browser in terms of extensions – i.e. small browser add-ons which modify or add to existing functionality. It has hundreds of add-ons, … Read more

Recently a new personalized start page product was announced, Webwag. In the comments to my post about Webwag, several people expressed their view that start pages are not a viable business. Personally I think start pages have plenty of opportunities to make money, despite (and sometimes because of) competition from Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. An … Read more

Turkey is next in this R/WW series on top international Web apps. It’s the 9th country I’ve profiled so far – the others have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain and China. For the following information on Turkey, I have Emre Sokullu to thank (also Honor Gunday for info on his web … Read more

Lately there’s been an increasing buzz about Web Office, something which I’ve been writing about for some time now. Red Herring magazine wrote an article with the provocative headline 17 MS Office Killers. While it would be quite a story if Microsoft did get usurped by a Web-based Office, the reality is that Microsoft will … Read more

Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus. In this post, we survey a range of client applications which utilize the new web platform. This is a follow-up to our Web Platform Primer post a few days ago, in which we explained the building blocks of the new Web infrastructure: The Web Computing Platform … Read more

Despite all the broohaha over whether Spaces is the biggest blog service on the planet, it’s apparent that Windows Live is making an impact on the Web. After being around for less than a year, Alexa now ranks Live.com (and all its sub-domains) as the 10th biggest property on the Web. And yet it doesn’t … Read more

Amazon has just released a companion product to its online storage solution S3. With a name almost as surreal as Mechanical Turk (which is Amazon’s collective intelligence service), the new ‘compute’ service is called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. It all sounds like a Terry Gilliam movie, but it is Amazon at its innovative best once … Read more

China is next in my series on top international Web apps. If you haven’t been following, the other countries I’ve profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia and Spain. As this series has gone on, the comments have become as important as the posts – perhaps moreso. I’m hoping this … Read more