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ReadWrite Web

• Does Your Browser Know Where You Are? With Mozilla Geode, It Might (Tue, 07 Oct 2008 02:05:00 -0700)
  Today, the old real estate adage 'location, location, location' could just as easily be applied to the Web, where it seems that "where you are" is becoming as important as the information you're seeking. Nowhere is that more apparent than with GPS-enabled mobile platforms that use location-specific information to simplify the way people access and share content on a daily basis. Later today Mozilla will release Geode, a Firefox geolocation add-on which will enable localized content. Sponsor Not to be left out, the major players have begun to facilitate and support the sharing of geolocation information, as well. Google has been pushing Google Gears to handle geolocation information, Yahoo! has opened its location database to developers, and GPS on the Apple iPhone has been enabling a slew of new applications. But where does that leave the typical laptop user? Mozilla Labs is working to answer that question. In August, Mozilla announced the addition of support for geolocation information. In that announcement, Doug Turner said, "I would love to be able to get the UI support in Firefox. This would allow the 'extension' to be more or less the glue between a geolocation device and mozilla." Tomorrow, Turner's wish may be coming true when Mozilla releases Geode, "a Firefox add-on that understands location, enabling enriched, personalized, and localized content." VentureBeat has an early glimpse of Geode, but it is still "not entirely clear how it's pulling in the location data." Hopefully, the official announcement will shed more light on Geode. Why Is Location Important for Relatively Static Users? Clearly, geolocation information can improve the experience for mobile users, but why would this functionality be needed in the browser? One answer jumps to mind: relevance. Location-specific information is a passive—yet relevant—means of managing the growing complexity of the information on the Web. By enabling the dynamic localization of information in the browser, Mozilla may be helping users find truly relevant information, and in so doing, may make the Web an even more valuable resource. Discuss
• ReadWriteWeb Expands Silicon Forest Empire - Rick Turoczy Joins Us (Tue, 07 Oct 2008 01:50:34 -0700)
  Our newest writer started tonight, Rick Turoczy - who many of you will know from his tech blog Silicon Florist. Rick is yet another RWW writer who hails from Portland, Oregon, USA. Marshall Kirkpatrick and Frederic Lardinois are also from that city. According to Wikipedia, Silicon Forest refers to "the cluster of high tech companies located in the Portland metropolitan area". Obviously ReadWriteWeb deems it of strategic importance to have a dominant presence in Silicon Forest, in terms of tech bloggers. Sponsor Rick has helped Portland startups with traditional and Web-based communications activities for more than a dozen years. We welcome him to the ReadWriteWeb team, where he will be a daily news writer. Discuss
• Google Mail Goggles: Are You Sure You Want to Send That? (Mon, 06 Oct 2008 20:58:50 -0700)
  Google has improved any number of the Web activities in which we engage during the day. But what about those activities that occur late at night? Like firing off that email at 3 AM on Sunday morning after a night out? If Jon Perlow has his way, Google may be able to save you from that moment of regret, too. Sponsor Perlow has used his Google Labs' time to build a new feature called "Mail Goggles." It's a simple addition to your Gmail settings that promises to make sending that soon-to-be-cold-sweat-inducing email a little more difficult: "When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind?" Set to late-night Friday and Saturday by default, Mail Goggles can be configured to give you pause any day of the week at any time period you prefer. So, if you're more likely to send off regrettable emails on Monday than Friday, you're still covered. To enable Mail Goggles, visit the Labs area in Gmail, select the time period you prefer, and save the changes. Discuss
• Google Has Changed Political Debate Forever (Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:55:55 -0700)
  When I was on the high school debate team, about 15 years ago, using the Internet was considered strange, if not cheating. We used photocopy machines, print magazines and academic journals almost exclusively. That time in the world's history is now gone forever. digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Google_Has_Changed_Political_Debate_Forever';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';When Sarah Palin and Joe Biden debated in front of one of the largest TV audiences in US election history last week, the two candidates might not have been Googling for facts during the debate, but millions of people watching the debate were. Today Google released some information about what kinds of things viewers were searching for as that debate unfolded, minute by minute. It is amazing both that viewers were able to do such a thing, in real time, and that we're able to watch what people are searching for. The internet in general, and Google in particular, has substantially augmented this important part of public life. Sponsor The collective search history provides an interesting look at the world's reaction to what the candidates are saying. Google points out, for example, that one of the hottest searches of the night was "define:maverick." I wouldn't mind learning more about the word maverick myself but I'm struck by the evidence that so many people know the search protocol define: and are comfortable using it in a dynamic situation! Other interesting, popular search queries mentioned in Google's blog post today included: meaning of theocracy windfall profits tax nucular vs nuclear, nuclear pronunciation, palin nucular, and even nukular "When Senator Biden offered a civics lesson ("Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the Executive Branch") many people checked, and learned that Article I of the Constitution describes the legislative branch of the U.S. government. The executive branch is described in Article II. Others just searched directly for the role of vice president and vice president duties." It's pretty incredible to know that these topics resonated enough with the public that they sought to learn more about them online. That people were even curious enough to ask is encouraging (at least for someone hoping the Democrats will win). Another technology that changed the debate experience was Current's live video stream with a Twitter overlay, which we wrote about immediately after the first Presidential debate. The candidates may not have used online search while they were debating, but we sure hope they will every day they are in office. It's changed fundamentally our relationship with politics and we hope that politicians can keep up. Maybe they can even take the lead. Discuss
• RWW Live: Mobile Web Development (Updated With New Guests) (Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:20:01 -0700)
  The latest episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, kicks off at 3.30pm PST Monday (6.30pm EST). The topic is Mobile Web Development and we have guests from Google, Microsoft, Pandora and DevelopmentNow joining us. 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. In this show we will cover the state of the mobile application development market, focusing on Android, Windows Mobile, iPhone, and more. Sponsor We have 4 special guests on the call: Dan Morrill, Developer Advocate for Google Android Loke Uei Tan, Tech Product Manager from Windows Mobile Tom Conrad, CTO of Pandora Ben Strackany from mobile development company DevelopmentNow. Note: we invited Apple to send a representative from the iPhone team, but received no response. The show is hosted as always by Sean Ammirati, with Richard MacManus and Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb on the call. We're also very pleased to have last100 editor Steve O'Hear back for this show, given that last100 covers the Mobile Web space widely and deeply. Before the show starts, we're interested in what questions you have for the panelists. Please leave a comment on this post and one of the RWW crew on the call (Sean, Marshall, Steve and myself) will do our best to ask your question. We will post the audio from the show at the end, but we hope you join us LIVE on Calliflower or Facebook. Discuss
• Hakia Relaunches With 'Credible Sites' (Mon, 06 Oct 2008 11:24:55 -0700)
  Semantic search engine Hakia announced a major redesign of its site today, including the addition of 'credible sites' to its search index. In order to create this index of trustworthy sites, Hakia is asking volunteers to submit credible, peer reviewed sources. Credible sites are currently limited to health and environmental topics, but Hakia is planning to expand this quickly. By adding these credible sources, Hakia wants to go beyond '10 blue links' and give its users an alternative to popularity driven approaches like Google's PageRank. Hakia has also added a 'Galleries' section, which is a structured directory of some of the most popular search topics. Sponsor Credible Sources In order to create this index of credible and trustworthy sites, Hakia is relying on volunteers. Hakia is specifically recruiting librarians, though it seems anybody can sign up, which could potentially leave the site open to spammers. Hakia asks submitters for their professional credentials, but it is not clear if the company will actually check these. Hakia uses a very strict definition for what makes a site credible. To be included in the index, a site should have gone through a peer review process, not have any commercial bias, and the information should be current. The fact that Hakia insists on only adding peer reviewed sites should greatly enhances the signal-to-noise ratio of the search results. Great Structured Results In our tests, we were often impressed by hakia's ability to structure its regular search results. For 'Sarah Palin', for example, Hakia organizes the results by official websites, images, news, biography, awards, and speeches. A search for 'Portland, OR,' on the other hand, first displays general information about the city, images, transportation options, and restaurant guides. All results now also feature images and user-generate content. Whenever we tried to ask more general questions ("What is a blog?"), however, Hakia's results were often underwhelming and uneven. Sometimes we got results that were spot-on, while at other times, the results barely had anything to do with our query. Hakia also introduced 'my hakia,' a personal start page which still looks a bit unfinished, but seems to rely on Hakia's expertise in structuring search results to give users more background information about current events. Overall, we liked Hakia's updates and we are looking forward to the expansion of the 'credible sources' to other topics, as we were quite impressed with the results it returns already. Discuss
• I Like Ask.com - But Somebody Needs to Put a Fork in It (Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:17:53 -0700)
  What do you say to an old friend who's over extending themselves yet again? This morning 3rd tier search engine Ask.com proudly tooted its horn one more time - "It's Here! The New Ask.com!" digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/I_Like_Ask_com_But_Somebody_Needs_to_Put_a_Fork_in_It';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';Ask.com is a decent search engine, it does a lot of things well enough to check out once and appreciate before moving on. (Maps, for example.) I use its Blogsearch all day long. I like Ask and many of the innovative things it does, but not enough to use many of its tools with any regularity. Today the search engine relaunched, saying it now leverages Semantic Technologies. Upon performing some searches though - I can't tell what's different. I just wish they'd stop. Sponsor In its blog post today, the company says: Presenting direct answers to your searches, front and center, has always been at the heart of the Ask.com experience, and we push further down that path today with the introduction of three new answer technologies: DADS, DAFS, and AnswerFarm. Didn't anyone ever teach Erik Collier, Ask VP of Product Management, that it's rude to drop acronyms in conversation without defining them? He never does in the announcement. It makes you look pretentious, unless you are a perpetual also-ran after years in your field and millions spent advertising - then it just makes you look silly. By DAFS I presume they mean Document Attribute Format Specification (or did they mean Direct Access File System?), I can't find a mention of DADS in 40 semantic web blogs we follow and presumably AnswerFarm is the new Q&A tab. So the new Ask.com brings acronyms for superior performance to the table. The Q&A tab is cute. I tried a wide range of questions and it gave me nothing but ads. If I grunted a phrase at it, then the AnswerFarm offered some Questions on that topic that I might not have thought to ask. Entertaining, educational and a bit like flipping through an Encyclopedia with a celebrated but totally non-functioning table of contents. Just a few months ago it was reported that Ask decided to focus on the Question and Answer paradigm because it's popular with existing users. Today's announcement appears consistent with that - though semantic parsing of the questions being asked is a lot less impressive than semantic analysis of the pages being indexed by the search engine. According to an eWeek profile this morning, Ask is showcasing its ability to understand the meaning of search queries, even if the words are jumbled. It sounds like "semantic web" more in the flavor of Powerset than Yahoo Search Monkey - and presumably Ask didn't spend Powerset-like cash to do the same level of research. What Ask Does Right I like Ask's Blogsearch a lot. It offers a very clear value proposition. It places a premium on blog feeds that have been subscribed to in the company's popular feed reader Bloglines. That cuts down on spam and offers all kinds of intriguing possibilities for discovering who the top bloggers are who write about certain keywords. I'm not kidding when I say I use it all day, every day. These incessant "relaunches" of Ask.com's primary site are getting really old, though. Relaunches and stupid ad campaigns just aren't cutting it. Ask should focus on doing something they can really compete in. The AnswerFarm tab could be a good one, if it worked better. Discuss
• EBay Buys Bill Me Later and DBA - Lays Off 1,000 (Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:09:45 -0700)
  EBay today announced that it will acquire U.S. based online payments business Bill Me Later and the Danish classifieds site dba.dk. For Bill Me Later, eBay paid approximately $820 million in cash and $125 in outstanding options, while it acquired the Danish sites for $390 in cash. At the same time, eBay also announced that it plans to reduce its workforce by 10 percent. Sponsor Bill Me Later, which is based in Maryland, launched in 2003 and Amazon, one of eBay biggest rivals, invested in it in 2007. While it doesn't have the name recognition of Paypal, Bill Me Later actually has a larger market share than PayPal and has a number of very large clients, including various airlines, Amazon, TigerDirect, and Apple. According to Gartner, Bill Me Later has seen triple-digit growth in the last few years. Dba.dk is Denmark's largest online classifieds and auctions site and has been able to challenge eBay in its own market. Fewer Auction - More Direct Transactions EBay's move to acquire classifieds sites and payment services is part of the company's strategy of putting less emphasis on auctions and more on direct transactions. EBay is currently in a bit of a slump and its workforce reduction is clearly meant to keep cost under control while the company restructures its business. Bill Me Later company profile provided by TradeVibes Discuss
• Is Facebook Becoming MySpace? (Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:15:27 -0700)
  Given Facebook's growing marketshare both here in the U.S. and worldwide, there's a growing concern that Facebook will soon morph into that other social network - one that many of us had happily left behind: MySpace. But unfortunately, hints of MySpace have been cropping up into Facebook lately thanks to things like new, tricked-out profiles and the recently launched video content. Is Facebook...gasp...turning into MySpace? Sponsor MySpace: We Used To Be Friends Although always a hub for finding music, MySpace was also once a great place to go and hang out with your friends online, too. But something changed. Maybe it was the "who can have the most friends" contests that had people adding perfect strangers to their profiles, or maybe it was the spam bots that wanted to "be your friend," or maybe it was the headache-inducing profiles filled with glittery graphics and overloaded with media. Most likely, though, it was a combination of all these things and more that made an exodus from MySpace so appealing. Now, don't misunderstand. We know that for many people out there, MySpace is still very much a part of their online social lives, and that's fine. But we're also aware of a number of a growing number of users ditching MySpace for Facebook. Some even reported that the the split is occurring along class lines. Whatever the case, there's one big thing that draws people to Facebook: it's not MySpace. Danger! Eyesores Ahead: Facebook App Gives You MySpace-esque Profiles Exhibit A in the Myspace-ification (yes, we know that's not a word) of Facebook is the new app put out by PageRage. Once installed, you can dress up your Facebook profile in any number of themes. The themes feature designs involving nature, art, causes, politics, and more. This app uses the technology from Yontoo which lets you make changes to web sites once installed. With it, skinning Facebook is easy. Although the above may look like a disaster in the making if you prefer less busy profiles, unlike MySpace, you do have an out: just don't install the app. Without the PageRage app installed, Facebook profiles look clean and uncluttered, the same as usual. Video on Facebook? How Very MySpace Of You Another area where Facebook is becoming more MySpace-like is video. Thanks to last week's newly announced partnership between application maker Slide and major media companies, a new app called FunSpace Channels has now launched. Here, Facebook users can search, watch, and share the latest TV, music, and other video content from media partners CBS, Current Media, E! Entertainment, FUEL TV, Hulu, Sony BMG, TMZ, Universal Music Group, 236.com, Break Media, CollegeHumor, Howcast, Video Detective, and YouTube. This move had some questioning whether or not Facebook is where you would go to watch TV online. On NY Times Bits blog, Saul Hansell writes: Is the core of Facebook about consuming media? That's always been the biggest difference between MySpace and Facebook. On MySpace, users are defining their personalities by programming their own collage of text, photos, music and video, blending work they created themselves with clips of professional work. When you are on MySpace you read about what your friends are doing, but at the same time you are listing to what they are listening to and watching what they are watching. Facebook is all about person-to-person and person-to-small group communications. We wondered that as well. In the past, Facebook was all about communication, not consuming media, that was MySpace...right? Apparently not. According to research analyst David Card with Jupiter Research, a June survey showed that only 12% of social network users regularly watch professional video on social networks and there's no statistical difference between MySpace and Facebook users. In other words, watching video on social networks is still in low demand, so offering video on Facebook only really caters to the heaviest of entertainment consumers. Yet Slide FunSpace has managed to accumulate 18,330,571 monthly active users since its launch on October 1st, 2008. Spammers Aren't Your Friends Then there's the spam problem. According to Security Labs, they've noticed a rise in spam emails posing as Facebook friend requests. Those malicious emails actually contain attachments with Trojan horses in the form of a .zip file. These emails arrive in your inbox, but they never originated from Facebook. However, that distinction will be lost on the less tech-savvy. The Facebook brand can still feel the affects of this negative association and, even worse, the site could be blamed by its users for sending spam. In addition to the malicious spam, the Chicago Tribune reports that companies attempting to market to customers on Facebook are getting mistaken for spam and are being booted from the system. Those companies may be walking a fine line between using Facebook for communication purposes and spamming their friends, but it appears that Facebook is erring on the side of caution. That's good because what one company thinks is communication often just seems to us like spam, so we're happy that Facebook is taking a proactive approach. However, with so many people now use Facebook to organize large events like conferences, reunions, and the like, we hope that Facebook isn't unilaterally knocking people off based on arbitrary limits. Not MySpace Yet So it seems that Facebook is picking up some of MySpace's themes - busy profiles, video entertainment, and yes,spam, but we think Facebook still has a fighting chance. For one thing, the first two items - profiles and TV - are entirely optional, as they are applications you can choose to install or ignore as you wish. As for the spam, it may be on the increase, but at least Facebook isn't really at fault. Having previously provided their users with an "ignore all" button to fight application spam, Facebook knows that spam is the sort of thing that can make or break a social network. Fighting this type of spam is really just a user education issue - the same issue that banks, eBay, and credit card companies have to deal with all the time. It doesn't take much to change user perception, but thankfully, Facebook hasn't become a MySpace clone yet. However, it's worth noting these small steps in MySpace's direction. Discuss
• Social Media and Shopping: A Growing Trend (Mon, 06 Oct 2008 07:14:44 -0700)
  Social media is evolving. What began as a way to "hang out" with friends online has morphed into an entirely new platform for communication, information sharing, and marketing. Businesses are quickly discovering that if they want to reach the youngest demographic, Generation Y (born after 1979), they had best get online. But maintaining a web presence alone isn't enough anymore. According to new research from August 2008, web retailers are now actually trying to engage that demographic segment using social media. Sponsor Want To Market To Gen Y? Get on Facebook According to to a research from shopping comparison site PriceGrabber. Some 85% of Gen Y respondents said they participated in social networking, and 57% reported involvement with blogs. In order to market to Gen Y, web retailers are now starting to use social media to do so. According to an August 2008 survey by Internet Retailer, 39.3% of retail respondents use social networks for marketing purposes, 32% have a page on Facebook, 27% are on MySpace, and 26% are on YouTube. Shouldn't Those Numbers Be Higher? While it's encouraging to see web retailers reaching out to the youngest shoppers in this way, those number still seem sort of low. Do only 39.3% of retailers need to sell to Generation Y customers? We think that number should be higher. So why aren't more brands involved in social media yet? Is the problem that they're still learning how to use these tools or is it that they don't have room in their budgets for non-traditional marketing and advertising campaigns? Perhaps it's a little of both. But another big issue to take into account is fear. Companies have relied on one-way communication methods for years as the method of reaching their customers. Social media, however, demands a two-way conversation. That means giving up some control, yes, but it also means there's an opportunity for increased loyalty when done correctly. When someone feels like their voice is being heard, there's the potential for having a customer for life. Another reason it's important for brands to listen to their customers is because there are now more ways than ever for customers to share their experiences with others online. A 2008 study conducted by the Society for New Communications Research for Nuance Communications found nearly three-quarters choose retailers and products based on others' customer care experiences shared online. In addition to word-of-mouth and other trusted sources like Consumer Reports, respondents found information about others' customer care experiences online in the following ways: Who's Doing What It's interesting to see micro-blogging sites on that chart above - you wouldn't have seen that even a year or two ago. Twitter, of course, is the main micro-blogging site of interest these days, at least here in the U.S. We looked at companies using Twitter for customer service not too long ago, and since then even more companies have come on board. However, if you're really interested in following companies that use social media for marketing, the best resource we've found so far is this extensive list collated by Peter Kim which, as of October 4th, includes 237 companies actively using social media for marketing purposes. At some point, though, we hope that making a list of involved companies will become impossible to do because they are just too many of them. Apparently, we're not there yet. Data in this article courtesy of eMarketer Image credit dollar sign, by pfala Discuss
• Will Google Use Chrome to Index Password Protected Web? (Sun, 05 Oct 2008 13:45:45 -0700)
  It's now over a month since Google released its open source web browser, Chrome. An interesting theory we heard recently is that Google will use Chrome to index the password protected Web - a.k.a. the 'dark web'. digg_url = 'http://digg.com/security/Is_Google_Using_Chrome_to_Index_Password_Protected_Web';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';Right now the Chrome Terms of Service (TOS) prevents Google from indexing private data. But when you consider that Chrome was initially presented as a browser for applications, instead of just web pages, this theory begins to make more sense. Sponsor Most web apps are password-protected and so there's no way for a normal search engine to index the data - even data that's generalized and doesn't identify individual users. But with a full-fledged browser to complement its search engine, Google now theoretically has the means to index this previously inaccessible data. So is Google planning to use Chrome in the future to index password protected data on the Web? This needn't be a sinister question to ask, because the Web has evolved into something that is not easily indexed. Neil McAllister wrote a great article back in July entitled Is the Web still the Web? (via Slashdot), that delved into this subject. Neil wrote: "Is it still the Web if it's not really hypertext? Is it still the Web if you can't navigate directly to specific content? Is it still the Web if the content can't be indexed and searched? Is it still the Web if you can only view the application on certain clients or devices? Is it still the Web if you can't view source?" As he also pointed out, RIA Flash and Silverlight content can now be searched - see our own writeup of this in July. So the next step is to be able to search and index web applications that rely on user-generated content. Chrome is the perfect vehicle to do that. There would have to be a change in the TOS to allow it, because indexing private data is of course still a no-no among search engines - especially the market leader Google. And there would be a big privacy issue with indexing your personal browsing history. But what if Google could convince users of the value of indexing web app data without identifying the individual user... What do you think of this theory - too far out? Remember that Chrome has already become by most accounts the 4th leading browser, after IE, Firefox and Safari. It's already usurped Opera and it's only 1 month old, still in beta and there's no Mac version. In ReadWriteWeb's stats for September, Chrome was used by 6.3% of our readers - not bad when you consider we have a higher proportion of Mac users than mainstream sites. When Chrome is 2nd or 3rd in the browser market, then it may be in a position to start implementing some grand plans - like indexing password protected data. Let us know if this is too crazy, or you can forsee a socially acceptable use case for this scenario. Update: Chris Messina notes that Flock already does this: "Flock already DOES index every page you visit with Lucene and keeps the data in an offline cache. I could imagine that if I were to want to use Flock on another computer, I wouldn't want to limit my search result to only what I visited on THAT machine -- I'd want to pull from my entire browsing history. We simply need protections to enable this kind of circumstance to be offered safely -- or at least with minimized risk." Discuss
• Sponsor Announcement: Defrag (Sun, 05 Oct 2008 13:42:57 -0700)
  RWW is the Premiere Media Sponsor for the Defrag Conference, happening 3-4 November in Denver Colorado. You can register for Defrag here. Entering the code "rww1" will get RWW readers $200 off of the early bird price. Highlights from Defrag this year will include a discussion about Strategic Intuition, a presentation from Esther Dyson called 'The Quantification of Everything', a discussion about whether collaboration is changing how we consume and interact with analysis, and much more. Sponsor Other topics Defrag will be exploring include: Enterprise 2.0 Online Collaboration The Implicit Web Collective Intelligence The Semantic Web Mash-ups Social Networking in the Enterprise Next-level Discovery Discuss
• Cartoon: Social Web Workaholic (Sun, 05 Oct 2008 13:41:33 -0700)
  Sorry you're not seeing this cartoon earlier, but I had to update my Facebook status, upload and tag my Flickr photos from yesterday, answer three LinkedIn questions and stay on top of my Twitter feed. There's something seductive about the social web, and the way it drives us to be always updating, always staying on top of our friends' updates, and always painfully aware that we could and should be doing more. I'd discuss more, but I need to go join a Seesmic chat... Sponsor More Noise to Signal Discuss
• The Top 10 RWW Stories in September; Summaries and Follow Up (Sun, 05 Oct 2008 02:35:43 -0700)
  Do you remember what was happening one month ago in web technology? On September 1st the only story on most of our minds was the news of a Goolge browser, Chrome, which would be released the next day. Chrome was a big story last month, but it wasn't the only big news by a long shot. Below we summarize and follow up on the 10 most-read stories on ReadWriteWeb in the month of September. These aren't necessarily the best stories, but they are the most popular. We hope you enjoy this little trip down short-term memory lane. Do these posts already feel like old news to you, our hyper savvy readers? Sponsor 10. Does Google Have Rights to Everything You Send Through Chrome? Google released its own browser at the start of this month and at launch the software had some really egregious claims in the End User License Agreement. An anonymous commenter pointed out in our previous coverage of Chrome that Google claimed to have rights to all the information you send through their browser to reuse for promotional purposes! Google quickly backed down and removed the clause, though we questioned in a later post (It's Time for a New Terms of Service Regime) why such conditions were a part of the default "boilerplate" licenses for all Google services. This post was discovered by readers from a wide variety of sources, including the Official Google Blog, which called us eagle eyed for catching the section of the license in question. In truth, it wasn't us that caught it, it was one of our anonymous readers, and we weren't the first blog to write about it either - we later noticed that Ina Fried at CNet found it first. 9. Five Ways to Use Social Media to Reach People Who Don't Use Social Media I wrote this post myself, after giving a presentation to the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network where several people in the audience said that they were concerned their target constituencies weren't using social networks, microblogging and blogs. Could those technologies be useful anyway? We listed five techniques we've found to be effective. More than 100 other blogs linked to this post in posts of their own, including particularly active conversations at Brazen Careerist (Social Media Is Difficult, Like Intimacy) and StreamXy (The Success System that Never Fails). 8. Top Digg User Zaibatsu Banned - Reactions from Both Zaibatsu and Digg Management Digg cleaned house this month, closing the accounts of scores of people it accused of cheating the system. Founding editor Richard MacManus covered this story for RWW. One of those users kicked off the site was the popular user Reg Saddler, or Zaibatsu, the person with the 3rd most submissions to hit the front page of all time. Digg said the last straw was Zaibatsu's submission of a page that claimed to have lascivious pictures of a female Digg user on it and actually was a sales page for some product - both of which are violations of the Digg Terms of Service. Zaibatsu offered his own defense but in the end said in comments that he's since decided to "cash in" after all and do the types of things he's been wrongly accused of doing. For an in depth look at the charming characters like Zaibatsu that make up and surround many top Digg users see our earlier post MrBabyMan: Digg Users Revolt, Against the One Pure Man at the Top. Our coverage of Zaibatsu's expulsion got a whole lot of readers from Digg. 7. Google to Offer its Own Browser: Chrome On the first of September, we wrote about Google's new browser that would be released the next day. The company mailed out some fantastic comic book style explanations of their plans and we linked to a slide show of those books in my post. There were a lot of questions that came up that day: what about Google's relationship with Firefox? Would Chrome ever go mainstream? Would another browser make web development more difficult? The idea behind Chrome was to build a browser that was mean for running applications, not just viewing web pages. We think that's a great idea and apparently a substantial percentage of our readers do as well. 6.5% of you visited ReadWriteWeb using Chrome in the first week it was available, in the past 3 weeks that number hasn't grown but it's only fell to 6.2%. We expect that percentage to grow substantially when a Mac version of Chrome is available. 6. Walmart Gives Consumers Number 1 Reason Why DRM is Not The Answer This weekend Corvida wrote about Walmart's decision to shut down its DRM server and either eat or tie to a single computer the music it sold its own customers. The post was huge on Digg, where conversation was heated in comments. We put the comments people left on that story at Digg in a Wordle.net tag cloud below, just to give you a taste of what that community thought about the post and news. 5. Cartoon: Anything You Tweet Can and Will Be Used Against You Rob Cottingham's weekly cartoon midmonth was very popular with readers - we'll let you click through for yourself to see it. According to YackTrack, 30 people Twittered a link to the cartoon out to their circle of friends. Among that group was Spanish poet and political blogger Jaun de Bravo, who said "No todo es tuiteable." We didn't know that was the Spanish word for Twitter! 4. Podcaster Developer Uses Little-Known "Ad Hoc" Mode To Distribute Banned iPhone App Sarah Perez dove into the mid-month debate about development on the iPhone platform with an in-depth post about a renegade app that used a back door to distribute an app outside the official App store. It was an app that let phone users listen to podcasts without subscribing to them in iTunes, which Apple wasn't very excited about. The post was submitted to Digg by a Washington state high school student named Zak M. Zak's been on Digg for more than a year now and has had 40 submissions hit the front page. Almost 40% of his front page submissions have been in the past 2 weeks, since sending up Sarah's post on this iPhone app! All we're saying is that Zak's on fire and maybe his success with Sarah's awesome post has something to do with that. Only joking! We offer our most humble thanks to anyone who summarizes and submits our posts well to Digg. Jason Ankeny at FierceDeveloper wrote just yesterday that Apple has now closed the loophole and the app that Sarah wrote about has been kicked off the platform. The developer, Alex Sokirynsky, says he's headed for Google's Android platform. 3. Rumor: EBay Trying to Sell StumbleUpon In the middle of the month TechCrunch did the kind of investigative work that, let's face it, no one in the tech blogosphere does better. They unearthed efforts by eBay to sell off social discovery site StumbleUpon. Our own Frederic Lardinois wrote up the rumor and speculated, as did Silicon Alley Insider, that selling off Skype would be an even better idea. Our post was a huge hit on StumbleUpon, as we presume most other posts were on this topic. 2. Top 10 Apps Worth Jailbreaking Your iPhone to Get On the first weekend of the month, Corvida wrote a monster post arguing that there were iPhone apps outside of the thousands of approved ones that were so good they were worth nullifying your phone's warranty for. Think the iPhone is just for Mac lovers? This was the 2nd most read story on ReadWriteWeb for the whole month and almost 80% of our site visitors use Windows. People love the iPhone, almost everyone does. (60% of the RWW writing staff, however, do not own an iPhone.) And the #1 most-read story on RWW for the month of September was... 1. Serious Security Flaw in Google Chrome On the day that Chrome came out, September 2nd, Frederic Lardinois wrote about a big security hole in the new Google browser. Tens of thousands of people wanted to know what it the security flaw was - perhaps for their protection and perhaps to gawk at the shortcomings in software from the otherwise triumphant Google. To be honest, it seems in retrospect like an odd story to be the hottest story here for the whole month. That's the facts, though. Ryan Narraine, a security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab, wrote the first report on the flaw at ZDNet but after a fairly extensive hunt we can't see any follow up from ZDNet or anyone else about whether the flaw has been fixed. A fair number of people argued that it wasn't even a flaw as it required a user to choose to run an executable. As Frederic pointed out in his point, the "flaw" depends on a lot of social engineering. Many commenters all around the web responded simply that it was too early to trust a brand new browser on its first day online. Conclusion: Last month was a big one for the web. As is often the case, the topics our readers came for the most were ones concerning control. That's one way to interpret them, at least. Could Chrome wrestle control over the browsing experience away from IE and Firefox? Could it put users more in control as a more appropriate tool to use in an era of applications, beyond web pages? DRM and the closed Apple iPhone store were the subject of multiple control control stories as well. Some of our favorite posts from last month that didn't make the top 10 list but that we wish had include User Experience, Learning from the Pros, Sarah Perez's 3 part Scannable World series and Richard MacManus's write up of a report finding that 70% of businesses now allow social media use at work. Thanks to everyone who stopped by ReadWriteWeb in the past month to read these stories. We appreciate your ongoing support and engagement in discussion. Image credit on water photo above, Seventh Sense by Flickr user woodleywonderworks. Discuss
• Social Media in Africa, Part 2: Mobile Innovations (Sun, 05 Oct 2008 02:32:53 -0700)
  In Amsterdam the social media technology conference PICNIC2008 wrapped up last week after devoting an entire day of scheduling to the innovations coming out of Africa. Dubbed 'Surprising Africa', the conference featured prolific social entrepreneurs and technology developers from around the world who offered insight into various projects from the African continent. In this post we look at the state of the fast-growing mobile industry in Africa. This is the second post in our series on Africa's Web (Part 1 is here). Sponsor Africa is unique in that it seems to have bypassed the same era of community infrastructure building that has occurred in developed nations around the world. This is not without reason, there are some incredible hurdles to over come. Displacing the poor, complying with local governments, paying bribes, and the risk of civil unrest. Thus, most of the technologies that currently permeate Africa aren't terrestrial. There are very few telephone lines, but mobile penetration is higher than any other region in the world. There is also limited terrestrial fiber for connecting to the internet. Instead, internet connectivity is distributed nearly entirely by satellite. As useful as this is now, satellite connections have a bottleneck that naturally limits the number of users who can connect before the whole network slows down. This keeps prices unreasonably high while internet speeds tend to be unreasonably slow in comparison to the rest of the world. The tough conditions developers face in the continent provide some challenges but overcoming them offers something greater. According to Ushahidi co-founder Erik Hersman: "The challenges brought about by bad governance, poverty, low bandwidth (all the negative things you associate with Africa) also provide an incredible opportunity. The developers who are coming up with solutions in the continent, the ones who are writing software or hacking hardware, are creating for some of the harshest environments and use-cases in the world. If it works in Africa, it will work anywhere." Perhaps this thought is what motivated Google to invest in O3B Networks earlier this month. O3B Networks is an ambitious attempt to bring three billion people in the developing world (mainly in parts of Asia and Africa) online by launching sixteen inexpensive, low-orbit satellites. The potential benefits for Google are obvious. This is three billion new internet users, who will more than likely use Google to search, and who will potentially click-through Adsense links and use other Google products. An indicator that Google may be anticipating as much is their move into Africa last year. They've since opened offices and hired people in both South Africa and Kenya with plans to eventually operate out of all sub-Saharan African countries. Mobile Penetration Statistics from Africa At the end of 2007 there were over 280 million mobile phone subscribers in Africa, representing a penetration rate of 30.4% Africa has become the fastest growing mobile market in the world with mobile penetration in the region ranging from 30% to 100% from country to country. Fastest growing markets are in Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt Increased competition as more operators come online in each country (11 in Nigeria, 4 in Kenya and SA, 3 in Egypt and Morocco) Pre-paid subscriptions account for nearly 95 percent of total mobile subscriptions in the region. The Democratic Republic of Congo, population 60 million, has 10,000 fixed telephones but more than a million mobile phone subscribers. In Chad, the fifth-least developed country, mobile phone usage jumped from 10,000 to 200,000 in three years. via PICNIC2008 African Innovations in Mobile A broad look at some of the tech being produced for the mobile industry by the continent... Micro-payments and Mobile Banking In Africa, until recently, there's been no easy way for consumers to purchase things other than with cash. Most financial institutions on the continent don't offer credit credit cards, and those that do have trouble finding other institutions that will accept them. This has lead to an incredible amount of innovation in the areas of micro-payments and mobile banking. MPESA by Safaricom (micro-payments) and Wizzit (mobile banking) are examples. Mobile News Reporting Because of the lack of basic infrastructure, getting information from one place to another quickly is often extremely difficult. A number of organizations have tackled this problem using Mobile devices. mPedigree offers a way to authenticate pharmaceutical drugs and prescriptions using SMS. Winafrique tackles issues with communication and power by offering wind powered cellular towers. QuestionBox.org collects data from and distributes it to rural areas using a SMS/web/voice platform. Ushahidi allows people to report and geolocate incidents of violence and incident using SMS. Mobile Application Developers Kenya's Mobile Planet made news in August when Google announced that they'd be investing in the mobile application start-up. Mobile Planet specializes in the development of wireless voice & data applications for mobile devices in Kenya, with a special focus on SMS-based products and services. Meanwhile, independent developers like Moris Mbetsa have repurposed mobile technology for all sorts of solutions like this anti-theft and tracking system for vehicles. See also: Social Media in Africa, Part 1 Discuss