2008

There’s more user unrest in the community of popular social news site Digg, after the all-time number 3 ranked user Zaibatsu, a.k.a. Reg Saddler, was banned for alleged multiple violations of the Digg Terms of Use. That decision is “final and irreversible”, according to an email Saddler got from Digg today. JD Rucker of Social … Read more

We’re live now in the latest episode of RWW Live, our podcast show. You can tune into the show, and interact with us via the chat, by clicking here. You can also use the Calliflower Facebook app to tune in and participate. This week’s topic is Data Portability, the ongoing campaign for open data across … Read more

This week, as part of our ongoing Mainstream Web Watch series, we’ll be looking into how religious groups are using Web technologies. As early adopters in the tech industry, many of us have near spiritual experiences about our favorite products – as Rob Cottingham highlighted in his RWW cartoon over the weekend! But let’s look … Read more

It’s time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. This week we surveyed the leading online banking products and 10 recommended photo sharing sites. We also checked out a new ‘deep web’ search tool and reported on Joost’s move to the browser. Our prediction question this week was about the controversial … Read more

This week we reported that Cognition had announced “the largest commercially available Semantic Map of the English language.” In our interview with Cognition CEO Scott Janus, we asked him to compare Cognition’s technologies to those of other semantic search companies Hakia and Powerset. Janus pointed to their large Semantic Map as the main differentiator. Indeed … Read more

Cisco announced today the acquisition of Jabber, Inc., a provider of presence and messaging software. It’s important to note that Cisco has acquired the company called Jabber (jabber.com), not the open standard Jabber (jabber.org) which we have written about extensively in the past. The Jabber protocol, now called XMPP, is an open standard for Instant … Read more

Web analytics firm WebTrends reported today that mainstream Internet users are “embracing” the Google Chrome browser. In the third week since its launch, WebTrends states that Google Chrome is the fourth most popular browser used by visitors to the web site of The Daily Telegraph, Britain’s highest selling newspaper. WebTrends puts the figure at “nearly … Read more

A new report from Universal McCann discusses the rise of “a new breed of super influencers” that has been created by “the tools of the social media revolution.” Before we all don our superhero capes, let’s look more closely at the findings of the report. Entitled When did we start trusting strangers? How the internet … Read more

A new report from Handango – a distribution network for smartphone applications across the BlackBerry, Palm, Windows Mobile, Symbian OS, and Linux platforms – states that gaming apps have jumped in popularity this year. In a report entitled First Half 2008 Handango Yardstick, Handango’s regular review of the global smartphone content industry, it notes that … Read more

Cognition Technologies, a Semantic Web company that specialises in Natural Language Processing (NLP) search, is today announcing the release of what it claims is “the largest commercially available Semantic Map of the English language.” We interviewed Cognition CEO Scott Janus to find out what this means. We also discovered that Cognition, which currently licenses its … Read more

A new report about Enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, by Awareness, Inc., shows that employers are increasingly allowing staff to use social media applications in working hours. Awareness puts the figure at 69 percent of businesses in 2008, up from 37 percent last year. It’s the latest in a string of reports this year … Read more

Join us now for our weekly review of Web Technology news and reviews. This week we reported on the launch of Apple’s iTunes 8, analyzed AOL’s move to bring RSS and lifestreaming to the mainstream, and covered some of the best web apps to come out of DEMOfall08. On the trends side, we looked into … Read more

We track hundreds of web apps here on ReadWriteWeb. Some, like YouTube and last.fm, become our favorites and prosper. But others sadly close down, or whither away due to not many people using them, or suddenly stop working for one reason or another (the bills are too high, the RIAA gets on their back, the … Read more

The latest episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, is set to begin shortly at 3.30pm PST (6.30pm EST). This week’s topic is, you guessed it, Chrome. We will be discussing Google’s new open source browser and its potential impact in the browser market. We have 3 very special guests on the show to … Read more

This week we’re running a prediction challenge, on the topic of browsers. Google’s new browser, Chrome (our coverage), is sure to take market share from the existing players. So we want you to help us predict: which of the following browsers will lose the most share (in percentage terms) between August 2008 and December 2008? … Read more