Continuing our Social Books series, today I’m looking at book highlights. The increasing popularity of e-readers, in particular the Kindle, has made it common practice to highlight passages and quotes within books. There have been various efforts to make those highlights social and today I’ll look at the two leading services. One is from Amazon … Read more

Today I reviewed my magazine subscriptions, partly to see which of Apple’s iTunes, Amazon’s Kindle and digital magazine indie Zinio has the best offering currently. My check reaffirmed many positive things about digital magazines, but one thing still frustrates me: the user experience for subscriptions in both iTunes and Kindle. Apple and Amazon could learn … Read more

Yesterday I reviewed the leading social network for book readers, Goodreads. In the second post in my Social Books series, I’m checking out a brand new social network for book writers. Called Writer’s Bloq, it was founded by a young wannabe writer from New York named Nayia Moysidis. In a phone interview, I discovered that … Read more

My next series of posts is entitled Social Books. Over five posts, I’m going to explore how book readers and writers use social networking tools. Three of the posts will be from the point of view of readers, starting with this one today about the leading social network for bookworms: Goodreads. In the remaining posts, … Read more

In this fifth and final installment of our How To Filter The Social Web series, I’m looking at a mobile service called Prismatic. It’s a slick looking website and iPhone app that filters social news for you. Filtering news on mobile has traditionally been a tough nut to crack – and there’s no shortage of … Read more

I’m on the hunt for five great tools to filter the social Web. The fourth product I’m looking at is Bottlenose, a social media dashboard that allows you to filter content by topic. For example: Andy Murray winning his first Grand Slam tennis title today. Bottlenose was founded by well-regarded Semantic Web geek Nova Spivack. … Read more

I’m on the hunt for five great tools to filter the social Web! Last week I looked at medical news curator Webicina and topic-based news aggregator Reddit. Both of those products enabled me to filter for content. But just as we’re overwhelmed with the amount of content on the social Web, we’re also overwhelmed with … Read more

“The only thing more perfect than reading is more reading,” declared Amazon in a TV advert for its new Kindle eReader device. At a self-hosted event in Santa Monica today, Amazon launched new versions of its eReader and tablet products. Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos spent over an hour on stage, extolling the virtues of … Read more

This week I’m exploring tools that help filter your Social Web experience. Yesterday I checked out Webicina, a medical news curation service. Today I’m re-visiting a service that has a much broader appeal, at least in terms of topics covered: reddit. The Condé Nast owned social news aggregator has become so popular that even the … Read more

This week I’m going to be exploring filtering tools on the Web, with a particular focus on general interest topics like health, politics and sports. The Web is often an overwhelmingly noisy environment. Even the best social media services – like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ – can quickly drown you in a deluge of real-time … Read more

Last Friday I did a presentation at The Project [R]evolution conference in Auckland, New Zealand. I presented on a topic I’ve been writing a lot about recently: the reimagination of publishing. I haven’t been this excited about innovation in Web publishing since the early, experimental days of blogging, when I started ReadWriteWeb circa 2002-03. In … Read more

As streams of information become more popular on the Web, we need better ways to consume and manage them. Apps that allow you to aggregate content from different sources – Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news websites and more – may become very popular. That’s if they can overcome the increasingly walled gardens of Facebook and Twitter. … Read more

One of the five reasons why Web publishing is changing is the emergence of streams of information. In other words, a constant flow of information ordered chronologically and (ideally) topically too. In the near future, the theory goes, it won’t matter where you enter content – a blog platform, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etcetera – because … Read more

This week I’m exploring why topic pages are getting traction on the social Web. But one potential flaw in topic pages is that they are typically closed networks. Wikipedia, The New York Times, Branch, Medium – these are all tightly controlled, essentially closed knowledge networks. Sure you can wrangle an invite to Branch, or eventually … Read more

Yesterday we outlined why topic pages are becoming increasingly popular on the Web, as a way to organize social or news content. As daily consumers of such content, we’re used to the chronological (and often real-time) ordering of updates from Facebook, Twitter, blogs and more. But the latest wave of Web publishing services, like Pinterest … Read more