2007

Simply Google is an unofficial portal for Google apps and services. Charles Knight mentioned it in his original Top 100 Alt Search Engines List, as an example of how the famously sparse Google homepage could be enhanced. In Charles’ words: “Instead of squeezing through the keyhole in order to reach Google’s 37 search options, Simply … Read more

Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Apologies for missing last week’s wrapup, due to travel. Note that you can subscribe to the weekly wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email: Top Web News This week we saw a lot of action on the Web Office suite … Read more

Interesting posts recently from two people who have an important role in defining the future of the browser. Firstly, I missed it while I was in transit in the US, but Mozilla developer Alex Faaborg posted the slides of his presentation at the recent Web 2.0 Expo. They are fascinating and show clearly where Mozilla … Read more

Online radio station Last.fm is adding a video section to its site this week, enabling users to create their own personalised video channels – similar to how users can already create radio stations based on their music tastes. Last.fm is partnering with major and independent labels for this. The company also claims that the quality … Read more

Interesting reaction over at The Guardian blog to our post yesterday about the StartUp2.0 competition for European web 2.0 sites. Guardian blogger Jack Schofield said that he only recognized 1 out of the 15 finalists. Jack wrote: “What I find amusing is that I’ve only actually used — or even heard of — one of … Read more

RateItAll, a social network based around online reviews and opinions, has released a new distributed rating widget. It enables users to not only view (read) a widget, but to interact with it and enter data (write). The initial application for RateItAll’s read/write widget is a blog feedback badge, which is the first of many distributed … Read more

NewsGator announces user base milestones; Newsgator is something of a quiet revolution these days. It isn’t announcing flashy features like Google Reader or Yahoo Pipes, but today it announced that more than one million people use NewsGator’s consumer RSS solutions, and its RSS platform is accessed over 10 million times per day by users of … Read more

At the Software 2007 conference on Tuesday in San Jose CA, on-demand document management provider ShareMethods will announce the launch of an open standards Web Office suite called ShareOffice. The company says it is the world’s first open standards online office suite. What’s more, ShareOffice is an excellent example of using best-of-breed Web Office apps … Read more

Today we published a detailed analysis of search innovation techniques by Nitin Karandikar. The post is long, but well worth reading if you are interested in where search is headed. To complement the post, we’re running a poll asking which of the 4 categories of search innovation that Nitin identified, do you think is key … Read more

Last week’s Read/WriteWeb poll asked what you thought of Silverlight, Microsoft’s newly improved rich internet app plug-in that was launched to (unusually) rave blog reviews at MIX on Monday. Some people even said that Silverlight leaves Adobe’s Flash technology in the dust, which is a big claim to make given that Flash is still extremely … Read more

Well it’s been another great trip to the USA! I’ve visited San Francisco (for Web 2.0 Expo), Las Vegas for MIX (courtesy of Microsoft New Zealand) and finally a couple of days in Los Angeles (just to see the sights!). Tonight I head back to New Zealand, getting set for full-time blogging again on Monday. … Read more

All the buzz here at Microsoft MIX in Vegas is rightly about Silverlight, but one other impressive demo I came across was a Vista gadget (a.k.a. widget) for Disney. Entertainment and Devices Division President Robbie Bach was on the main stage yesterday, talking about marketing Microsoft’s connected entertainment services. One of the case studies wheeled … Read more

The announcement last night of iGoogle (the new name for Google Personalized Homepage), Gadget Maker and other localization features, shows that Google is ramping up its personalization efforts once again. Google Blogoscoped has excellent coverage from the Google Personalization Workshop, held yesterday at Mountain View for a select group of local bloggers. In this post … Read more

As noted in our coverage of Ray Ozzie’s MIX keynote this morning, Microsoft has released a number of significant upgrades to its Silverlight product. Silverlight is essentially a competitor to Adobe’s Flash, in that enables developers to create interactive web apps. It’s officially described as “a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of … Read more