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In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we analyze the impact of real-time information on the Web, investigate ‘web squared’ (when web 2.0 meets Internet of Things), tell you why cloud computing is the future of mobile, look at Delicious’ new Twitter re-design, check out Digg’s read/write API plans, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

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Our Report gives you the facts on 240 deals closed in April, May and June – who invested, in what company, how much they invested and when. Read on to see what’s included in the guide and how to purchase it.

Web Trends

Could Real Time Information Be An Unfair Advantage?

The US Securities and Exchange Commission is considering a ban on a stock market practice known as “flash trading,” where supercomputers get access to information milliseconds before other traders. This raises similar issues about the growing prominence of real-time information on the web.

Web Squared: When Web 2.0 Meets Internet of Things

Recently Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle released a white paper entitled Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On. It’s a none to subtle attempt to re-brand web 2.0. But less cynically, the report also nicely applies Web 2.0 principles onto the emerging Internet of Things.

Twitter’s Most Active Users: Bots, Dogs, and Tila Tequila

Only 5% of Twitter’s users account for 75% of all the activity on the service, and almost one third of all the tweets posted by the most active users come from bots that each generate more than 150 tweets per day. According to a new report, one quarter of all the messages posted on Twitter are currently generated by bots.

As the EBook Market Matures, Amazon Will Face Stiff Competition

eBooks and eReaders are slowly but surely becoming mainstream. However, while Amazon is the current market leader among early adopters of this technology, there will be a lot of opportunities for other players in the market – including Sony and large mass-market retailers like Walmart.

Why Cloud Computing is the Future of Mobile

The term “cloud computing” is being bandied about a lot these days, mainly in the context of the “future of the web.” But cloud computing’s potential doesn’t begin and end with the personal computer’s transformation into a thin client – the mobile platform is going to be heavily impacted by this technology as well.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We’d like to thank ReadWriteWeb’s sponsors, without whom we couldn’t bring you all these stories every week!

• Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
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ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations. Sponsored by Socialtext.

Enterprise 2.0: Awareness is Easier Than Execution, Says Nielsen

In a new report studying social networking on intranets, Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen asserts that despite broad awareness, real execution of Web 2.0 in the enterprise is still rare at this point. This is a sobering reminder of just what it takes to make change happen in business.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

How to Scale Without Losing Your Shirt

This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here.

There comes a time for every venture when the owners have to decide whether hockey-stick-like growth is feasible or not. In your initial plan, you indicated a sudden surge in revenue at a certain point in time, i.e. where the hockey stick shows up. You have now reached that point. You may have a great business, but will it hit the big time?

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

MySpace to Unveil Integration With Sites Around the Web, Using Open Standards

MySpace will announce in the next few weeks a major new feature being added to its MySpaceID product that will allow third-party websites to write updates into the MySpace activity feed just like Facebook Connect, but will also incorporate open semantic microformat code too.

Delicious Reborn as Real-Time News Tracker

Yahoo’s social bookmarking service Delicious launched a new home page this week, combining recent tagging activity and cross-referenced links on Twitter to deliver what it calls the hottest news from around the web in real time.

Digg Opening Up? New Read/Write API Coming Soon

The social news community at Digg.com may be on the verge of opening up. A forthcoming Digg API will allow people to “not only read data, but also contribute data, too.” In other words, a Read/Write API.

SchoolRack Gives Teachers, Students, Parents Interactive Resources Online

SchoolRack is a resource for grade school and high school teachers to create their own websites where they can communicate and interact with their students and those students’ parents.

Spotify to Close Up to $50M Round Before US Launch

In anticipation of the company’s US launch, the on-demand music streaming site Spotify is finalizing what is rumored to be a $50 million dollar round of investments. This will value the Swedish company at $250 million dollars.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Read more here:
Weekly Wrapup: Real Time Delicious, Read/Write Digg, Web Squared, And More…

Don’t want to deal with the DiggBar? Or what if you want other tools to help improve your Digg experience? We have you covered with these Firefox add-ons.

DiggBar Remover Start with the DiggBar Remover. It removes the DiggBar when you’re browsing. Done? Ok, move on to these other add-ons…

Digg Comment Spotlight Sifting through Digg comments can be a pain. But the Digg Comment Spotlight highlights comments on a Digg story that were dugg by other users. So, if you don’t want to read comments that were buried or never dugg, the Digg Comment Spotlight will help you quickly find all those comments that others liked. It makes reading comments much easier.

Digg Firefox Extension The Digg Firefox Extension lets you know if the page you’re on has been submitted to Digg. If not, you can submit it in just a few clicks. If it has, the extension displays the number of Diggs the story has, how many people have commented on it, and the story’s description. My favorite feature is the popular story notification, which pops up whenever a new story hits the front page. Overall, the Digg Firefox Extension is designed well. It’s a must-have for any Digg fanatic.

The Digg Sidebar gets in the way.

(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET)

Digg Sidebar The Digg Sidebar gives you real-time updates of all Digg activity. It runs in the sidebar and updates automatically without requiring a refresh. It’s useful for some who want constant updates about Digg, but I didn’t like how much screen real estate it took up. And resizing it, while possible, reduces its usefulness, since it’s harder to read stories. It’s best suited to the Digg addict.

Digg This! If you find a story you like, digging it is made simple with the help of Digg This! When you right-click on the page you’re browsing and choose the Digg This! option, you’ll be brought to the Digg submission page. Beware that you’ll need to fill out all the Digg fields to submit the story. That makes it a little annoying.

Interclue opens cached pages for you.

(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET)

Interclue Interclue lets you know when the link you’re about to click on might be dead. It also tells you if it contains malware. If it’s the former, it gives you the option to see the cached version of the page. If it’s the latter, it displays a dialog box telling you not to click on the link. Interclue will also let you view images from the destination site without leaving your current page. I’ve always been impressed by Interclue and I use it mostly when I’m on Digg. Check it out.

Smart Digg Button The Smart Digg button displays the number of Diggs the respective page has at the bottom corner of your Firefox window. If it hasn’t been submitted yet, you can click the button and you’ll be brought to the submission page. I really like the Smart Digg Button because it’s so simple, yet useful. I just wish it was available on Firefox 3.

Tadsee When the Digg Effect rears its ugly head and you can’t access a site, Tadsee will come to the rescue. When you get to the dead page, all you need to do is right-click, choose Tadsee, and you’ll see the cached version. I’ve used it on numerous occasions when a site has been down.

The rest is here:
Firefox add-ons for the Digg fanatic

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we discuss web apps that have stood the ‘30 day test’ for our writers, analyze the past, present and future uses of the Twitter platform, look into the phenomenon of “ghost twittering”, review the latest changes to the Facebook homepage, check out the latest online TV trends, and more. Also we look at featured stories from Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb’s new product which tracks hires in tech and new media, and our Enterprise channel.

The Weekly Wrapup is sponsored by Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5:

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Web Products

Still Shiny: 23 Apps We’re Using One Month Later

Here at ReadWriteWeb we see hundreds of new apps, scripts, plug-ins and doo-das every week. We review some portion of those. Many we get excited about. But few stand the test of time for even 30 days. Here are 23 apps we’re still using a month or more after discovering them.

We wrote a similar post last November (“30 Days Later: 22 Apps We’re Still Using 1 Month After Finding Them“) and can happily report that we’re still loving almost all the services we wrote about then. If a service can make it past the 30 day mark, it has a good chance of sticking around for awhile. 22 or 23 in a month is a pretty impressive number really, so go web innovators go!

The Future of Firefox: Interview With Mozilla’s Chief Innovation Officer

In my recent visit to Silicon Valley, I got the chance to visit the Mozilla headquarters. Among others at the organization, I spoke to Chris Beard – Mozilla’s Chief Innovation Officer and the person overseeing its efforts to bring new concepts to the browser, a.k.a. Mozilla Labs. We discussed where Firefox is heading and how it compares to Google Chrome in particular. We also talked about Mozilla’s new mobile browser Fennec, the add-on platform, and how recent innovations by Mozilla – such as Weave and Ubiquity – fit into the big picture. In this post we’ll focus on the near future of Firefox.

Last.fm to Charge Subscription Fee for Many International Listeners

The CBS-acquired streaming music service Last.fm announced this week that it will “soon” require users outside of the US, UK and Germany to pay €3.00 per month to keep the music rolling. In blog comments on the announcement, the company explained that those three countries were the only ones where ad sales were proving successful enough to monetize the free music that way; elsewhere the money will have to come out of listeners’ pockets. It’s a dramatic move that could pave the way for other media companies to do the same and effectively open up international markets. People complain, but do you think that viewers would pay a similar monthly fee for international access to Hulu, for example? We do.

Facebook Tweaks New Homepages in Response to User Complaints

As we reported last week, Facebook’s users clearly disliked the latest updates to their homepages, and now, Facebook is giving in to pressure from its most vocal users. According to Facebook, its users were especially unhappy with the lack of filtering mechanisms for the news stream on their homepages. This week Facebook’s Chris Cox announced that the company plans to tweak the current design in order to give users greater control over what updates appear in the news stream.

The White House Has a Digg Clone

The White House has launched a new web site where anyone can submit and vote up their most important questions for President Obama about the economy. That’s right – the White House has a Digg clone!

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We’d like to thank ReadWriteWeb’s sponsors, without whom we couldn’t bring you all these stories every week!

• Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
• Web 3.0 Conference, semantic web and linked data, May 19-20 NYC
• Socialtext brings you 5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration Success
• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• TaxACT lets you file your taxes online.
• Calais brings semantic functionality into your website or app.
• Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
• Wistia offers private video sharing for business.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

Jobwire

Former Yahoo! Now Guitar Hero Frontman

Activision Blizzard announced that it has appointed former Yahoo! COO Dan Rosensweig to be its new President and CEO of of RedOctane, the business unit which develops the mega-popular video game Guitar Hero. Rosensweig will be responsible for Guitar Hero’s global operations “including game development, hardware manufacturing, supply chain, logistics and marketing” and report to President & CEO of Activision Publishing Mike Griffith.

SUBSCRIBE TO READWRITEWEB’S JOBWIRE FOR THE LATEST NEWS ON JOB HIRES IN TECH

Web Trends

The Twitter Platform: 3 Years Old and Ready to Change the World

Twitter marked its 3rd birthday last weekend and the site that Nielsen called the fastest growing social network last month shows no signs of slowing down. While active participation by users is a great show of strength, the use of Twitter as a platform for developers and aggregate data analysis is the most exciting thing about the company. The story of Twitter as a platform is just beginning; the most exciting developments are still to come. In this post we share our three favorite examples of what Twitter is becoming; these 3rd party uses of the service point the way for the larger Twitter ecosystem to become even more important in the future. We’re not talking about Twitter clients, we’re talking about Twitter data mining.

How Do You Feel About “Ghost Twittering?”

The New York Times this week had an interesting article about the new trend of “ghost Twittering.” If you don’t know what that means, it’s when someone, usually a celebrity, politician, or a “personal brand” of some sort, pays another person or other people to update their Twitter account on their behalf. This “ghost writer” of tweets thus becomes a “ghost Twitterer.” While it may make sense for someone like U.S. President Barack Obama to farm out Twitter updates to staff (he has bigger tasks to focus on than tweets), when individual celebs and micro-celebs engage in this practice it seems a bit disingenuous. Is it really so hard to post 140 characters every now and then?

Gen Y Says: “I Want My Social TV!”

New research from Parks Associates found that many Gen Y TV viewers are ready for a change when it comes to their television-watching experience. According to a recent report, over one-fourth of users ages 18-24 are interested in having more social media features integrated into their TV. This data should come as good news to companies like Verizon and Yahoo!, both of whom have been pushing their new social networking widgets. But it also has broader implications that go beyond kids just wanting Facebook on their TV. The study found that there’s a desire to use social networking as a platform to actually enhance the TV-watching experience through interactive chats with other viewers and to have the ability to recommend shows to friends.

Got an Hour? Create a Server in the Cloud

Dave Winer recently announced EC2 for Poets, a step-by-step guide to help you create a server on Amazon’s EC2. “It’s time to stop thinking about these servers as being things for geeks and start thinking about them as things for people with ideas,” Winer said in a podcast roadmap he created for this work. The technology available today is enabling anyone with even the slightest technical bent to get out there and create amazing new things; often taking the technology in directions than the company which created it could have ever imagined.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

Enterprise

Salesforce.com Integrates Twitter

When Gmail failed a few months ago, I tried using Google to find out what was going on. When that did not get me an answer, I tried Twitter and did find some answers. That alerted me to the power of real-time search in one specific usage case. It was a relatively minor problem for me. But what if I ran customer service for a SaaS firm that just had a major outage? How would I find and monitor the conversations going on out there? That is what this week’s announcement by Salesforce.com about Twitter integration is all about.

Email us if you’re interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb’s Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Here is the original:
Weekly Wrapup: Ghost Twittering, Last.fm Charges, Future of Firefox, And More…

*****

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

Originally posted here:
High Points on the Social Media Landscape

In the old days—like, six or seven years ago—if someone had a bad experience with a company, he or she generally vented about it to a few friends and that was the end of it. The emergence of social media changed all that of course, so now that person can vent online to, essentially, the entire world. And search engines love social media, which helps expose that rant to anyone searching for the company’s name.

Lee Odden recently framed this topic effectively in a post about digital reputation management, noting “There are plenty of CEOs, executives, brand and business managers that are facing the dilemma of what to do about their company and brand reputation online…Companies like Kryptonite Locks, Comcast, Dell, Walmart and Sony have all experienced what it’s like to ignore the influence of the social web and the subsequent effect on how their brands are reflected, both in the search results and within social media channels.”

This Time, It’s Personal

What these CEOs and other executives also need to appreciate is the importance of their personal brand. These individuals are often the “face” of their organizations; as they get quoted in press releases and news articles, pen bylined articles, speak at conferences, and talk to industry influencers and prospective customers, their names can become almost as well known as their brands. That makes it crucial for business leaders even at smaller companies who may not in the past have considered themselves “public figures” to manage not only their firms’ online reputations, but also their own.

A few examples. One executive I know, the president of a software company, shares the first page of Google with a biomedical researcher, a diplomat, a (not exactly best-selling) author, and the Facebook page of a college student from North Dakota. While that isn’t a terrible group to potentially be confused with, this executive has a sufficiently unique name that he should be able to own more of the real estate on this page, including the top spot (he’s currently #5), thereby making himself—and his company—easier to find.

Another executive acquaintance has things a bit worse. He shows up on the first page alright, but several of the links are to dot-com-meltdown era news articles about a company he worked with that had some of the typical problems of tech companies at the time (collapsing stock price, low on cash, disgruntled shareholders etc.). The full story is that he wasn’t the cause of these problems at all; he was hired to fix them, which he did, successfully taking the company prviate and turning it around. But a casual Googler wouldn’t get that story from the page one results without really digging.

On the other side of the ledger are individuals such as Jon Rognerud and Guy Kawasaki. Jon has a somewhat unusual name obviously (and the “Jon” spelling helps), but he isn’t the only person on the planet with that moniker. Yet he owns the first five pages of Google for his identity. Guy owns at least the first ten pages of Google (being a best-selling author helps) and none of the references are disparaging.

How To Be Seen

Granted, it may not be realistic for executives with more common surnames and less fame to achieve quite those levels, but most could nevertheless dramatically improve their personal online reputation management using the following techniques.

• Buy yourname.com if it is available. Use the domain to build a professional website (e.g., GuyKawasaki.com) or redirect it to a suitable page, such as the Management Team page on your corporate site.
• While you’re at it, spend the $95 to own your personal LookupPage.
• Make sure the Management Team page on your company website is optimized for your name.
• If you can make the time commitment, start your own blog. At the very least, look for opportunities to write guest-posts and/or get interviewed for blogs related to your industry.
• Write an article (or articles) for Google Knol on topics pertaining to your product or service. As an example, here’s one I wrote about records management. You can link to other blog posts, published articles, white papers or other informational content your company has produced about the topic.
• Record a short video introducing yourself and your company to potential customers and anyone else who may be interested. For examples, see the Pitches section on TechCrunch. Use your name in the title of the video (e.g. firstname-lastname-of-companyname.mp4). Upload the video to YouTube and Vimeo so it’s easy to share on blogs and other sites.
• Upload company-related photos—you, other executives on your team, your building, your products, screenshots (if there is any software component to your product), your logo, etc.—to photo-sharing sites like Flickr.
• Start Twittering. Use your real name in your profile.
• Create accounts on social bookmarking sites like Wikio, Mixx, Digg and/or StumbleUpon. Any time there is an online news story or blog post published about your company or product, submit it. Also submit other items that may be of interest to your customers and prospects.
• Hire a social media-savvy PR person to help you get interviewed by prominent bloggers and writers in your industry.

• Consider writing a Wikipedia page about yourself. Keep in mind, however, that you have to be considered a public figure (or at least be able to make the argument that you should be) or the Wikipedia cabal will reject the article and take it down. That means you’ll need to have links to third-party sources who have written about you, and the, er, idiosyncratic folks at Wikipedia will have to agree. For example, Tim Young the relief pitcher for the Expos and Red Sox has a Wikipedia page, but Tim Young, CEO of on-demand social networking platform Socialcast doesn’t.
• Create and maintain profile pages on social networking and directory sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Naymz, Jigsaw, Plaxo, ZoomInfo, CrunchBase (for technology executives), and VisualCV.

Professional corporate “evangelists” like Scott Monty and Christopher Barger, not surprisingly, tend to show up pretty well on search. But shouldn’t the CEO—particularly at smaller firms—be one of a company’s biggest evangelists? Stakeholders may very well think so. As a top executive, you are a public figure, and people will search for your name on the web. Online reputation management gives you at least some control over what they’ll find.

*****

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

Here is the original post:
Don’t They Know Who You Are? Why Reputation Management is Critical