ReadWriteWeb

In this latest instalment in our series on recommendation engines, we look at ATG – an e-commerce services vendor which, among other things, provides recommendations technology to retailers such as Tommy Hilfiger and BetterWorldBooks. ATG has a similar “blended” approach to recommendations as richrelevance, whom we profiled last week – in other words it uses … Read more

Google I/O is a now annual event being held this year on May 27 – 28, 2009 in San Francisco. It’s aimed at web developers, to whom Google will showcase “how to develop web applications with Google and open technologies.” ReadWriteWeb has 10 free tickets to give away to Google I/O; and we thought an … Read more

Webstock, a conference for Web professionals, is happening in Wellington New Zealand this week. As usual it’s a classy lineup of speakers and a number of international webheads will be jetting in for the event. They include science fiction author Bruce Sterling, Flickr’s Heather Champ, Social Web designer Joshua Porter, Dopplr’s Matt Biddulph, Institute for … Read more

Social networks are making it increasingly easy to organize and propagate protests. One that caught our eye today is the New Zealand Internet Blackout, which is using a variety of Internet services to protest against a new law in New Zealand – the Guilt Upon Accusation law ‘Section 92A’. This law may have major implications … Read more

The most obvious feature of Apture is that it is a pop-up technology. Apture is a Javascript plug-in for publishers that adds contextual information to links – via pop-ups which display when users hover over or click on them. However, because of its association with pop-ups, Apture thinks it’s gotten a bad rap. Many people … Read more

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we look at the latest social networking statistics showing that Facebook has overtaken MySpace, review a product that’s had great success using OpenID, continue our series on recommendation engines, check out the new version of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, … Read more

This week we received an email from a reader telling us that he’d tried to add a link to ReadWriteWeb onto a Wikipedia article, only to get the message: “The following link has triggered our spam protection filter: http://www.readwriteweb.com. Either that exact link, or a portion of it (typically the root domain name) is currently … Read more

Last week we looked at Baynote, a recommendations company that focuses on real-time community behavior instead of personalization. Today we look at a company that takes a broader approach: richrelevance uses personalization extensively, plus the wisdom of the crowds when relevant. richrelevance claims that its approach is “adaptive AI” and that customers such as Sears … Read more

A new charity effort called Twestival.fm, which bills itself as “a kind of Twitter-driven Live Aid”, aims to raise $20,000 USD in 2 weeks using music donated by artists on Twitter. People can download MP3s for free, but are encouraged to give a donation in exchange. Twestival.fm currently has donated tracks from over 350 artists, … Read more

We’ve written a lot about how Barack Obama’s Internet strategy was a significant reason for his success last year – first in the Democratic nomination, then the Presidential election. We’ve analyzed how the Obama campaign made masterful use of social media and we’ve commented on Obama’s use of the Internet as President – not to … Read more

People’s Music Store is a newly launched DIY online music store. It was created by the founder of MP3 reseller Bleep.com, Ged Day. People’s Music Store styles itself as “the first music store entirely powered by music fans.” Basically the service allows you to set up your own custom-designed record store, with music chosen from … Read more

In a recent post, we looked at recommendation systems, briefly reviewing how Amazon and Google have implemented their own systems for recommending products and content to their users. We had the opportunity to speak with Satnam Alag, author of the recently published Collective Intelligence in Action, about what makes for a good recommendation system, where … Read more

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we continue our series on recommendation technologies with a special RWW Live podcast and a review of Baynote; we analyze a new Google product called Latitude, which could change the way you network on mobile phones; we describe how … Read more

Baynote is one of a number of recommendation technology providers which licenses its product to commercial companies. As we’ll see in this article, Baynote places particular emphasis on real-time user behaviors – which Baynote claims goes beyond Amazon’s “first generation” approach to recommendations. One thing that we’ve discovered so far in our series on recommendation … Read more

Band Metrics is a new semantic web application, currently in private beta but about to go public, which aims to give musicians the ability to measure the success of their music online. In particular musicians will be able to get metrics showing them who’s listening to, sharing and talking about their music across various social … Read more