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A year ago we profiled an oddly-named service called ://URLFAN, which we concluded was a good ‘Influence Index’ for the Web. ://URLFAN ranks websites by popularity, based on blog mentions. Unlike analytics services like Alexa or Compete, ://URLFAN doesn’t measure website traffic. It’s similar to Technorati, only ://URLFAN ranks all websites and not just blogs. … Read more

One of my co-presenters at this month’s Media 08 event in Sydney was Benjamin Joffe, Managing Director at Asia Internet consultancy +8* and Co-Founder of MobileMonday Beijing. At Media 08 Benjamin discussed the leading social networks in Asia. In particular he compared global leader Facebook with Cyworld, Mixi and QQ. According to Benjamin, Facebook is … Read more

Roger Thompson at Exploit Prevention Labs has discovered multiple hacked MySpace pages, including MySpace’s #4 most popular major music artist Alicia Keys. Other bands hit include Greements of Fortune (a French funk band) and Dykeenies (a rock band from Glasgow). Roger noted that “attacks on MySpace seem to be on the rise.” He says that … Read more

Our post a few weeks ago, 10 Future Web Trends, received a lot of excellent feedback. The most interesting was from people offering alternative future web trends to the ones we had chosen. In fact there were some grumblings that our 10 picks were not futuristic enough – so in this post let’s see if … Read more

A big thank you to our sponsors for supporting Read/WriteWeb. Wine Library TV is one of my favorite video blogs. In the latest episode Gary Vaynerchuk checks out some California Chardonnay. Zoho is a leading Web Office suite, with probably the most comprehensive product range of all the online office suites. Last week they introduced … Read more

Following the success of Facebook Week, every week on Read/WriteWeb we are going to focus on a particular Web Technology topic and investigate it. We’ll write 4-5 feature posts on each topic, run a poll, and also revisit past R/WW posts on the subject. We’re calling this new feature the Read/WriteWeb Files. This week we’ve … Read more

3D interfaces have been around since the Web began – and more than one dot com fell by the wayside partly because of an over-reaching 3D interface (cough, boo.com). Indeed as we noted in December, virtual shopping malls are still alive and kicking. But is 3D of any use on the Web, or is it … Read more

Our post this week about GoogleOS led to some vigorous and fascinating discussion in Read/WriteWeb. 87 mostly thoughtful comments were left here, plus many more on Slashdot and Digg. To get a final, more succinct, picture of whether R/WW readers expect to see a GoogleOS – here is a poll for you. I hope there … Read more

While at the Web 2.0 Summit last week I caught up with About.com CEO Scott Meyer. About.com is the long-standing network of how-to websites, purchased in March 2005 by the New York Times Company for $410 Million. Since that time About.com has continued to flourish – it has 31 Million people visiting it each month … Read more

It’s Apple Showtime today and as usual, plenty of great coverage to sort through. Here is a quick filter of the news, with a focus on Web-related announcements from Apple. iPod and iTunes forge ahead in online media The iPod now has 75.6% market share, according to Apple. The range of ‘devices’ it connects to … Read more

Ben Barren’s written an excellent series of posts about his favorite features to flip. Here’s his top ten: #1 – Podcasting Ratings #2 – Better Blogging Tools #3 – MySpace meets Linkedin #4 – Non-Text RSS Reader #5 – RSS Search/Reader Attention Glue #6 – Images for Adsense #7 – Podcasting Creation Tool #8 – … Read more

John: how you handling the success? Sergey: attributes success to luck. followed our hearts in terms of research areas. found they had something useful and impactful. early on talked about open sourcing, but eventually started the company. exciting and wild ride. starting to get used to it. John: brings up terry semel conversation, how he … Read more

Very interesting John Battelle-hosted conversation with Terry Semel, Yahoo CEO, at the conference. The difference between outlook and attitude between Semel and Barry Diller is stark. On the one hand, Diller’s conversation yesterday was very much old-media, 20th century thinking. Semel on the other hand very much impressed me with his take on what is … Read more