2009

A new service called TweepML just launched that makes it easy to create and share groups of Twitter users. It’s more than just a grouping service though, TweepML is also an open extensible format. What OPML is to RSS, TweepML is to Twitter. Groups are of course one of the core features of social software, … Read more

This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the 5 biggest Web trends of 2009. Our first post was about Structured Data, our second about The Real-Time Web. The third part of our series is on Personalization. Personalization has long been a buzzword on the Internet. With the glut of information on the … Read more

This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the 5 biggest, most cutting edge Web trends to come out of 2009. We’re posting one trend analysis per day. Then at the end of the week we’ll publish a major update to our standard presentation about web technology trends. Our opening post was about … Read more

This week ReadWriteWeb will run a series of posts detailing what we think are the 5 biggest, most cutting edge Web trends to come out of 2009. We’ll be posting one trend analysis per day. Then at the end of the week we’ll publish a major update to our standard presentation about web technology trends. … Read more

Today I spotted a contextual advert within an email thread in Gmail. Usually these ‘sponsored links’ are displayed in a separate pane on the right-hand side of Gmail – i.e. outside of the actual email content. But this places the ad squarely within the content of the email thread. It’s possible this has been around … Read more

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we review the state of smart cards around the world, update you on the latest Augmented Reality news, ask whether eReaders are being priced too high, analyze Google’s Chrome OS browser plans, present our hands-on impressions of … Read more

This week we’re looking at Smart Cards, which have proliferated across the world mainly as a form of electronic payment for public transportation. Earlier this week we profiled Japan’s cutting edge Suica Card and London’s Oyster Card. Today we look at a widely used smart card that has been in service since 1997: the Octopus … Read more

At the SemTech conference in June I met with William Mougayar, founder and CEO of a semantic news platform called Eqentia. At the time the product was in development, but it is officially launching today. In a nutshell, Eqentia aggregates content into topics using semantic technology. In that respect it is similar to OpenCalais (our … Read more

This week we’re looking at the world of Smart Cards. Yesterday we checked out the Oyster Card, an RFID-powered smart card that millions of Londoners are using to pay for public transport. It’s one of the largest implementations of RFID in the western world. However perhaps because of that scale, it’s also fairly conservative. Right … Read more

The Oyster card is an RFID smart card used for electronic ticketing on London public transport services, notably the London Underground and buses. Other countries have similar smart cards. A couple that I’ve come across in real life recently were Boston’s CharlieCard and Wellington’s Snapper card. Some smart cards are used for other types of … Read more

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we explain why augmented reality is ramping up (and look at three new iPhone examples), analyze the top websites in the U.S., check out new Twitter statistics suggesting that teens don’t tweet, review recent Wikipedia changes, and … Read more

People who think that ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’ is a media phenomenon that peaked in the television era, may be disappointed to know that the same formula is becoming increasingly popular on the Web. As of July 2009, Break Media was ranked the 35th most popular site in the U.S. – one year ago it … Read more

Earlier this week we looked at the top 50 web properties in the U.S., according to comScore, and analyzed the changes over the past year. The top 5 were almost the same, except for the entrance of Facebook at number 5. What really caught our eye though was the progress of several less glamorous brands … Read more

In our recent post about the top 50 web properties in the U.S. according to comScore, we noted that Demand Media is on the rise – moving from #36 to #24 in the past 12 months. Demand Media owns a number of successful sites, including ehow.com, Pluck and eNom (the second or third-largest domain registrar … Read more

Annual changes of note: Facebook #5 with a rocket; Twitter entered Top 50 in June; Demand Media, Answers.com and Break Media sites to watch. comScore has just released their latest Media Metrix rankings for the Top 50 U.S. Web Properties. If we compare the top 50 to one year ago, we see that the top … Read more