2007

– Is that a pipe in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?; as expected, geeks (myself included) are drooling over Yahoo Pipes, the new RSS Remix service. Indeed the demand has caused some outages. I particularly recommend the following coverage: O’Reilly Radar (although “milestone in the history of the internet” is … Read more

French startup Zlio.com, a service that enables any Internet user to start a virtual store, has just launched in the US and also has plans for a UK version. It’s a free template-based system and you select the products you want to sell from a list of pre-approved merchants. There are 75 merchants in France, … Read more

RSS feed remixing has been a pet topic of mine for quite some time, so tonight it was a pleasure to discover Yahoo’s new Pipes service (hat-tip Thejesh). It’s a beta service from Yahoo and the name, which pays tribute to Unix pipes, betrays that it’s designed for geeks and early adopters to experiment with. … Read more

– Microsoft to Support OpenID; details are sketchy at this point, but Microsoft looks likely to utilize OpenID (the open, decentralized identity system) in some of its products. Brady Forrest has more info at O’Reilly Radar. If this turns out to be true, it’ll be a huge step forward and will put pressure on Yahoo … Read more

Yet another social network launched publicly today, but this one called Change.org caught my eye for a couple of reasons. Firstly it’s for a great cause – enabling people to form communities around social issues like global warming and Net Neutrality. But it’s also a very well designed site that makes excellent use of ‘web … Read more

Rather than spending the night writing posts, I’ve been wrestling with CSS and various other design issues – the result is a new menu and content tab structure for Read/WriteWeb. The design work on all the tabs was done by the amazing Mike Rundle (he also did the logo a couple of months ago). There … Read more

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has posted his Thoughts on Music in the ‘Hot News’ section of the Apple website. He starts off by explaining the background to Apple’s DRM on iTunes: “Since Apple does not own or control any music itself, it must license the rights to distribute music from others, primarily the “big four” … Read more

The 30 Boxes blog celebrated today the first anniversary of their product launch. The online calendar space has been a tough one, ever since Google released its calendar app in April last year. But right from the start 30 Boxes has been recognized as an innovative app and not just your usual Outlook clone. 30 … Read more

I know as much about the SuperBowl as US readers know about cricket! Nevertheless I am aware that SuperBowl is the biggest sporting event in the US and advertising during the game is highly expensive – over $2M for a 30 second TV slot. An interesting angle for Web Tech fans is: how well did … Read more

These summary posts are designed to be a ‘quick fix’ of the top Web news, for those people who don’t have time to read the full articles but who want to stay informed. – Internet Boom in China Is Built on Virtual Fun; NY Times continues the western fascination with all things China. This article … Read more

A recent Techcrunch Forum thread asked what is the difference between Techcrunch, Mashable and Read/WriteWeb? I think each has a unique brand and we’re pretty complementary when it comes down to it. But the comments got me thinking about what type of content people expect from R/WW. So please help us out and tell us … Read more

Couple of bits of Google product news this weekend. Firstly, at last some tangible evidence of an online presentations app from Google, one of the missing pieces so far in the much-anticipated Google Office suite. The ‘Google Operating System’ blog dug into some file notes from Google that reveal the code-name of the tool is … Read more

It’s a bit late, sorry, but here is a summary of last week’s action on Read/WriteWeb…. Faking it Our poll last week was an eye-opener. We asked: in your current Web activities where an identity is required (i.e. you can’t be anonymous) do you ever fake all or part of your identity? In the end … Read more

Tonight there’s a crucial cricket game on in the international Tri-Series involving Australia (the world champions), New Zealand and England. My team, New Zealand, is playing Australia tonight at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Sadly I don’t currently have TV access to the sports channel that televises cricket games here in NZ, so I have to … Read more

Yahoo has rolled out a new portal-type service called OurCity, a beta product that aggregates content about cities from across the Yahoo network and Wikipedia. It’s rolled out to just 2 cities so far, Bangalore and Delhi. It is described on the TechMag blog (who brought this to my attention) as a “mashup of yahoo … Read more