2007

In the young but growing world of user-generated news, sites like digg and slashdot dominate in the tech sphere. In the political arena, it is mostly editorial-driven sites that do well – such as DrudgeReport, HuffingtonPost and RawStory. Those sites get a lot of attention, but there are also a lot of so-called “Citizen Journalism” … Read more

The International Herald Tribune had a good article recently about the search market in South Korea. It points out that local search company Naver.com has more than 77 percent of all Web searches originating in South Korea, according to Internet market research company KoreanClick. This is largely due to user-generated content – specifically Naver’s “Knowledge … Read more

Our poll this week asks: Which Web company impressed you the most over the first half of 2007? Mid-week, Facebook has a handy lead over Google. Facebook has 34% of the vote, with Google second on 27%. Apple is third with 15%, probably reflecting the recent iPhone launch. Note that we added Adobe and Mozilla … Read more

Our sister site last100 has started a 2-part series exploring Microsoft’s Internet TV strategy: There may not be another company as well-positioned to take advantage of the growth in IPTV as Microsoft. Despite being primarily a software company, Microsoft has long had a passion for television. The company launched the 24-hour cable news channel MSNBC … Read more

There are a number of DIY social network services on the market, and in this post we’ll take a look at 3 of them – Ning, vibEngine and PeopleAggregator. By DIY, we mean services that allow you to create a custom social network for any topic. These services can be either hosted or based on … Read more

That’s a dramatic and possibly even sarcastic headline, but it was derived from a real question asked in our current post comparing indie blog platforms Six Apart and Automattic. Commenter jm wrote: “the other vision is that blogging is dead vs myspace/facebook stuff. Where is the need for a individual expression tool when the whole … Read more

Just a week after acquiring online telephony service GrandCentral, Google has announced the $625M purchase of Postini – a company that offers “on-demand communications security and compliance solutions serving more than 35,000 businesses and 10 million users worldwide.” The press release noted: “Postini’s services — which include message security, archiving, encryption, and policy enforcement — … Read more

An AP report today states that Nielsen/NetRatings, one of the leading Internet stats services, will “scrap rankings” based on page views and replace it with how long visitors spend at websites. The reason is that online video and technologies such as Ajax “increasingly make page views less meaningful.” We’ve known for some time, but it’s … Read more

This week’s poll is an extension of our 2007 Half-Year Web Technology Report, which reviewed the first six months of this year in web technology. In that report, I noted that Google and Facebook have been the two companies to impress me so far this year. But what do you think? We’ve asked a similar … Read more

UPDATE: In discussions with MediaTemple after things had calmed down, we agreed that R/WW is better off on a single tenant server. For all its positive points and innovation, ultimately the Grid is a multi-tentant solution – which when you have a critical asset (as R/WW is for me) is probably not the ideal solution. … Read more

This Monday morning in New Zealand, my local Wellington newspaper The Dominion Post ran a story about Read/WriteWeb. Seeing as the focus of the article is making a living off blogging, I thought I’d add some more thoughts on that. The DomPost article states: “Richard MacManus runs the world’s 28th most popular blog, Read/WriteWeb, from … Read more

Thank you to everyone who applied for the Read/WriteWeb writer roles we wrote about a couple of weeks ago. The response was amazing, with over 120 people applying. There were a lot of good applicants and the shortlist was brimming with talent. However we only had two part-time positions available and they have gone to: … Read more

Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email. Featured Posts To mark the halfway point of 2007, I wrote up a 2007 Half-Year Web Technology Report. This review showed that Google and Facebook … Read more

R/WW Network blog last100 has been busy reviewing new Internet TV services. This week last100 editor Steve O’Hear hands-on tested and wrote reviews of three Internet TV applications: VeohTV, which is pitching itself as a more open alternative to Joost; Zattoo, a p2p live streaming offering; and LiveStation, which like Zattoo also specializes in ‘live’ … Read more

Europe’s burgeoning startup culture just got another boost, with the launch of Seedcamp – a project to support Europe’s young entrepreneurs, by giving them funding and contacts. It’s very similar to Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator, the Paul Graham-led investment fund that specializes in early stage startups. We profiled Graham and Y Combinator in December last … Read more