2006

An interesting update to our post earlier this week about fake Social Network user profiles, created for marketing purposes. A Flickr forum thread states that the Red Passion user (the one referenced in our post, representing a marketing campaign for a beverages company) has now been terminated. Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield made this comment in … Read more

Yahoo has announced an event around Predictive Markets, called confab.yahoo. It’s described as an “open micro-conference series” and is being run by Yahoo!’s Technology Development Group. The reason it caught my eye was this: “We started confab.yahoo because we want to push the web and its applications up to the next level. After slightly more … Read more

Recent Google acquisition JotSpot found itself the subject of unwanted attention this week, when an early customer complained of being shut out after the Google deal. A blog post by someone named Kevin (no last name supplied) had all the gory details, but Kevin then subsequently deleted it (note: I’d already read it before it … Read more

This week Yahoo has released some new initiatives and polished up the design of existing content properties. Here is R/WW’s summary of the action, along with some commentary… Yahoo TV re-design – and is Yahoo scaling back RSS? Yahoo TV has had a re-design, giving it a liberal sprinkling of Ajax and social Web features. … Read more

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced today the business availability of the Windows Vista operating system, the 2007 release of Microsoft Office, and other new business software offerings. Vista and Office 07 be available from 30 January. The OS and Office launches were described as “the beginning of the most significant product launch in company history”. … Read more

Orange Spain, a mobile operator, has two new music services – ‘New Talents’ and ‘Enjoy your Music’. Both are powered by Music Intelligence Solutions, a provider of AI (artificial intelligence) software for music recommendation and discovery. Music Intelligence Solutions is an intriguing company. It was founded in 2002 and is based in Spain and the … Read more

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