It’s time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. On the product side, we continued our Best Products 2008 series with two more lists: Best Consumer Web Apps and Best RSS/Syndication Products. We also reported on Google’s Chrome browser coming out of beta and MySpace’s answer to Facebook Connect, MySpaceID. On … Read more

This week’s RWW Live, our regular podcast show, was on the topic of ‘shopping 2.0’. In Part 2 of our analysis of the show, we explore how e-commerce has evolved over the past few years – what web technologies our expert guests are currently using and the trends they’ve picked up on. We had 4 … Read more

Yesterday our regular podcast show, RWW Live, was on the topic of ‘shopping 2.0’. The show was very illuminating about how the Social Web has changed e-commerce and what tactics leading apps use to target their audience and make money. Indeed many of the lessons can and should be used by other forms of business, … Read more

According to a new report by Forrester Research, corporate blogs are the least trusted information source of all. Only 16% of online consumers who read corporate blogs say that they trust them. You can grab a copy of this report for free by filling in a form at Forrester. The full trust scale is below, … Read more

It’s coming up to Christmas and for many of us that means buying presents for family. If you’re in this situation, “what to buy?” becomes the most pressing question in your Christmas shopping expeditions. But what if you could take a quick look at the online shopping wish lists of your loved ones – it … Read more

In this week’s episode of RWW Live, to be broadcast live at 3.30pm PST Tuesday (6.30pm EST), ReadWriteWeb talks to a group of leaders in the online shopping market. We have executives from Retrevo, ModCloth, Baynote, ThisNext and Cartfly on the call, and we’ll be discussing what’s next in online shopping in this timely holiday … Read more

Former ReadWriteWeb network blog last100 has produced a screencast showing the web browser in Google’s Android phone the G1. last100 editor Steve O’Hear remarked that the bundled browser is “fast, renders the full web flawlessly (aside from the lack of Flash support), and does a fantastic job of re-flowing text when you zoom in on … Read more

MuseWorx is a SaaS service targeted at ‘creative types’ – marketing and advertising people, graphic designers, video production companies. It’s an on-demand platform that lets creative professionals store and share files, track them, edit and collaborate. Essentially it’s an asset management system, which is a common enough software type in this field. However the fact … Read more

Leading online music app last.fm has released its most popular songs, albums and artists of 2008. The rankings come from last.fm’s database, based on number of listeners. The music had to be released in 2008 to qualify for the charts. The Top 10 tracks is absolutely dominated by Coldplay’s Viva la Vida, with 6 songs … Read more

It’s time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. On the trends side, we took an in-depth look at the emerging world of open social networks. We pondered: which of Facebook Connect and OpenID will be more successful? And we explained why “distributed social networking” is a trend to watch, with … Read more

Distributed social networking – where users can connect their profile, friends and other data across multiple sites – is still a relatively new concept and not fully developed. There are plenty of companies and projects vying to be a major piece of the distributed social networking puzzle. The big Internet companies have initiatives such as … Read more

In 2008 we saw the Semantic Web gain traction, giving us plenty of choice when selecting the 10 best Semantic Web products of 2008. This is the first in a series of posts we’ll publish over December, listing our choices for the top web products of the year. Then at the end of December, we’ll … Read more

A couple of weeks ago we celebrated the first birthday of Google’s OpenSocial project, an open API framework for social networks and websites. Google’s OpenSocial Blog recently presented some statistics, including that OpenSocial now reaches nearly 675 M registered users and there are 7,500 applications. What’s interesting about these numbers is that the single largest … Read more

I’m very pleased to announce that Bernard Lunn has joined ReadWriteWeb full-time as our Chief Operating Officer. Starting today, Bernard will assume responsibility for most of the non-editorial functions of our business – sales, business development and other operational matters. This allows me to re-focus on leading our editorial, including doing more writing! I will … Read more

://URLFAN is an indexing service which ranks websites by popularity, based on blog mentions. It’s been around for a while, but we think it’s reached the point now where it’s a very useful tool to measure influence on the Internet. ://URLFAN is similar to Alexa and its measurement of popularity is reminiscent of Google’s PageRank. … Read more