2010

Tomorrow the band Arcade Fire releases their new album, The Suburbs. It’s interesting to look at how a popular band of today utilizes the Web to release and promote a new album. Is the band using Facebook more than MySpace now? Do they use Twitter and, if so, how? What music web sites are they … Read more

In the sidebar of your Facebook profile, below information about you and your friends, you can place widgets (a.k.a. “boxes”). These typically pull in information from a third party web service – for example Twitter, a book reviews site, a music application. This is all possible thanks to a development platform which Facebook introduced in … Read more

Content farms have been in the spotlight over the past year. They’re companies that generate hundreds or thousands of new pieces of content on a daily basis. Much of their traffic comes from Google search, so the aim of content farms is to rake in the money with online advertising. Demand Media has been the … Read more

Earlier today we published an analysis of the top traffic drivers in social media, based on data from Web analytics company Woopra. The biggest traffic driver was StumbleUpon (51%), followed by Digg (30%), Hacker News (12%) and Reddit (5%). Surprisingly, tech news community Slashdot was not in the list of top referrers. In fact, according … Read more

2-3 years ago, so-called “startpages” were all the rage – online dashboards where users could store links and quickly scan important news feeds. Startpages were also an evolving platform for “widgets,” mini web apps inside of a web page. The big Internet companies had startpages: iGoogle, My Yahoo!, Microsoft’s Live.com. Among the startups, Netvibes managed … Read more

When you think of social media, two products immediately come to mind: Facebook and Twitter. If you’re in the technical world, you’d probably also mention Digg and Slashdot. A product that is rarely talked about among social media products, but has a surprisingly large footprint on the Web, is StumbleUpon. It now has 10.6 million … Read more

The iPad has taken the tech world by storm this year. In a half-year poll, ReadWriteWeb readers voted it the most important product of 2010 so far. One of the few criticisms of the iPad has been that it’s mostly a media consumption device. It doesn’t have a camera and writing on the iPad is … Read more

The Internet will run out of Internet addresses in about 1 year’s time, we were told today by John Curran, President and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). The same thing was also stated recently by Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist. The main reason for the concern? There’s an explosion of … Read more

Two months ago, Yahoo! acquired Associated Content for an estimated $90-100M. Over the past few years, Associated Content has become one of the most prolific content farms (companies that churn out hundreds or thousands of new pieces of content every day). It produces 10,000 new pieces of content per week, which averages out to about … Read more

When it comes to content farms, companies that churn out hundreds or thousands of new pieces of content every day, Demand Media has harvested most of the headlines over the past year. But it’s not the only company out there betting on quantity of content – others include Associated Content (acquired by Yahoo! in May), … Read more

This blog was founded in 2003 on the philosophy of a read/write Web – a Web in which people can create content as easily as they consume it. This trend eventually came to be known as Web 2.0 – although others preferred Social Web – and was popularized by activities like blogging and social networking. … Read more

The new version of Digg has changed the playing field for two of its biggest constituents: power users and publishers. We discuss this with a long-time Digg power user. The latest version of social news site Digg is currently in restricted beta, with an additional 20,000 users added at the beginning of July. The new … Read more

The soccer World Cup has now ended, with Spain the victor. England was unceremoniously dumped out before the quarter finals – but if there was a World Cup for the Semantic Web, then the BBC may have lifted the trophy for its country. A post on the BBC Internet site explains how the BBC World … Read more

Extractiv has quietly launched a service that crawls the Web for text on a specific topic, then transforms it into “structured semantic data.” It’s a direct competitor to Thomson Reuters’ Calais product, which has been doing this for a couple of years now. This type of service is potentially valuable to media companies, search services … Read more

This week we ran a poll asking you to vote for the Web product or platform that has most impressed you in 2010. The overwhelming winner was the Apple iPad, launched in January. This isn’t a surprise, but the fact that the iPad garnered over twice as many votes as the second-place getter shows just … Read more