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This week the ReadWriteWeb team was in force at the Web 2.0 Summit, an annual event that covers the state of the Web industry. This year’s theme was ‘Web meets world’. ReadWriteWeb had exclusive access to video coverage of the event, via TechWeb (one of the producers of the event, along with O’Reilly Media). We’ve got a widget below that has links to all of the main sessions, with a few more probably to come over the next day or so. In this week’s Weekly Wrapup, our regular newsletter, we provide a summary of our posts and video.

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Oh and There Was the U.S. Election…

Of course the Web 2.0 Summit wasn’t the only thing of interest to happen this week. Barack Obama was elected to be the next President of the United States. Check out our slideshow of the election as seen on the Web.

Also much has been said about the masterful use of social media by the Obama campaign. The people working for the President-Elect were by far the more active – and the more savvy – of the two US Presidential candidates in terms of understanding and effectively employing social media as a way of engaging and motivating voters. Regardless of your political leanings, the numbers speak for themselves.

But was it just a means to an end? Or is this personal engagement – embracing social media as a new way of communicating with the masses – something we should expect Obama to use throughout his presidency? Check out our post Obama’s Social Media Advantage, Act II for more details.

Lance Armstrong on Politics, Ego, and Twitter

Cancer survivor, seven-time Tour de France champion – with the potential for more now that he’s announced he’s coming out of retirement – and Internet entrepreneur Lance Armstrong took to the stage with John Battelle at TechWeb/O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit on Wednesday. The topics ranged from Barack Obama and his new administration to Twitter to the power of ego, mind, and body.

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!

• WildApricot is Membership Management Software.
• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• Glue enables you to connect with friends while browsing.
• Strands provides real-time recommendations of products.
• Direct Media Exchange is a solution for managing ad networks.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• SmartyPig is Simple. Smart. Savings.
• Quintura is a visual-based search engine.
• Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

Cloud Computing Panel

An all-star panel took a closer look at the implications of the current shift towards cloud computing and discussed the possible business models around it. The panel featured Adobe’s CTO Kevin Lynch, Salesfore.com’s CEO Marc Benioff, Google’s Dave Girouard, and VMware’s CEO Paul Maritz. It was moderated by Tim O’Reilly.

Has Current Solved the User Generated Advertising Mystery?

At the Web 2.0 Summit today Current.tv co-founder Joel Hyatt told the audience that his video site and TV channel has landed multiple multi-million dollar advertising deals with giant companies, based on non-professional commercials created by fans. That’s something that a whole lot of companies have been trying to do, unsuccessfully, for years.

Hyatt was joined on stage by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, who once again repeated the “wait and see” answer when asked about his monetization strategy. Side-by-side with Current’s success, Twitter’s continued stalling seemed more unsatisfying than ever – but success in general felt more possible when we saw what Current has done.

Yahoo’s Jerry Yang at Web 2.0 Summit

Yahoo is obviously going through a rather tough period in its history right now. Last night, at TechWeb/O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit, John Battelle interviewed Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang and asked him about Microsoft’s takeover bid, Google’s decision to pull out of its advertising deal with Yahoo, and the persistent rumors of a possible acquisition of AOL by Yahoo. While Yang acknowledged Yahoo’s current problems and stated that he would still consider selling the company to Microsoft, his overall outlook for the company was quite upbeat.

Mary Meeker at Web 2.0 Summit: There is Hope

One of our favorite parts of the annual Web 2.0 Summit is Mary Meeker’s rapid fire data deluge about the Internet economy. You can view her PDF slides here. She started off by discussing the recession, which she said was “a long time coming” – but wondered “how long will it last?”. Meeker noted that advertising and technology spending is closely tied to GDP growth. From 2000 to 2002, USA spending fell 27%. Unfortunately, Meeker thinks that the current pattern looks a bit like early 2001. In 2000-2003 tech spending was flat or negative, however Meeker’s presentation included some rays of hope for entrepreneurs.

For a related Summit video, check out this discussion with Kleiner Perkins VC John Doerr:

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

Read the original here:
Weekly Wrapup: Web 2.0 Summit & Election Edition

For a little over a week now PlayStation 3 owners have been creating hundreds of levels in LittleBigPlanet, a platformer where creativity is both encouraged and rewarded using an ever-expanding level making tool set. The only problem is that these tools are relegated to the game, meaning if you’re away from your console there’s nothing more than a pen and paper for you to design your next masterpiece.

Media Molecule, the creators of LBP have attempted to change that, with new online tools that let you get your creative juices flowing right in the browser. Using simple drag and drop you can rotate, re-size, and combine over 40 objects in a large canvas. Included is a simple graphing grid which shows the relative scale of whatever you’re building to the characters in the LBP world, and when done you simply print out your creation which you can use as a reference when you’re back home.

To build a level just drag and drop objects from the right onto the canvas. When you're done you can print it out in one giant map which you can use as a blueprint when designing in-game.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

In addition to the blueprint maker, Media Molecule has also turned to YouTube for users to collaborate on level building. While there is no built-in capture mode in the game (despite it being built-in to the Playstation 3 API), you can find a multitude of creations on the video sharing service, and they’re being harvested on the LBP site.

Excerpt from:
More Web 2.0 in video games: The LittleBigPlanet blueprint maker

It was a marathon evening for media buffs as Barack Obama swept rival John McCain to become the first African American elected president in the U.S. You couldn’t miss it on Twitter, as the microblogging service exploded with election updates, commentary, and speculation.

Miraculously, Twitter’s servers lasted the night, and had quite a lot of terrific, 140-characters-long election commentary (in messages known as “tweets”) to serve up for hungry news hounds. Here are ten of CNET News’ favorites.

10. One of Barack Obama’s most-buzzed campaign innovations was announcing his running mate choice via text message. It not only bolstered the young candidate’s image as the nominee of choice for tech-savvy youth, but it also gave his campaign a huge repository of cell phone numbers–and nobody was surprised when Obama used them on Election Day. It even got on some users’ nerves: Twitterer FinanceGirl expressed her frustration: OMG, Obama! Please stop texting me!

9. In the interest of shameless self-promotion, this one comes from CNET News’ own Josh Lowensohn, who asked at the conclusion of Obama’s music-filled victory speech, This remind anyone else of the end of Return of the Jedi? With CNN using holograms to bring remote correspondents into the studio, Princess Leia-style, he’s got a point.

8. If you were following the election feed on Twitter during Obama’s acceptance speech, at one point, the conversation turned entirely to puppies. Backstory: Obama had promised his two young daughters that he’d give them a puppy if he won the election, and as he thanked his family in the speech he mentioned that, yes, they’d get the dog. From the Twittering masses came plenty of OMGs and adorable-speak, but Twitter user Dennis Yang had a different thought in mind: obama, do I get a puppy too?

7. Los Angeles-based Twitterer Bill Palmer noticed that literally everyone caught election fever: homeless guy on Hollywood Blvd with a sign that says “Obama aint the only one who wants change”–now that’s clever. McCain supporters, insert your own potshot about “spreading the wealth around” here.

6. One of the funniest Twitter accounts to follow during the election was the account for satire newspaper The Onion, and it was in high gear. Members of Twitter were encouraged to tag their tweets with #twitvote to provide election updates; The Onion naturally started planting fake ones. The best of the bunch: #twitvote 9:39 a.m. Dr. Monopoly Pumpernickel was denied a vote after he was shown to be nothing more than 3 small children in an overcoat.

5. Another pretty sweet tweet from The Onion: #twitvote: 5:57 p.m. Donald Pauley of Pickerington, OH fled the polling station when his voting machine asked, “Shall we play a game?”

4. As voting lines reached record lengths around the country, CrunchGear blogger Peter Ha told everyone via Twitter to calm down: If you can wait three+ days to buy a damned iPhone then you can wait on line to vote, a**hats. Crude, yes. But he gets his point across.

3. One of the biggest success stories of the election cycle, you know, besides the guy who won, was FiveThirtyEight.com and its owner, Nate Silver. The election prediction site sprang up out of Silver’s experience predicting baseball results, and Twitterers were in awe when FiveThirtyEight’s predictions turned out to be almost completely dead-on. Twitter user jdmcleodjr has some ideas for what he should do next: Incidentally, Nate Silver over at fivethirtyeight.com ought to take his act to Vegas. Well, if you’ve mastered baseball and national politics, there must be only one frontier left to conquer–poker!

2. It was a thrilling evening for Obama supporters, but some people have really been left out in the cold–namely, late-night talk-show hosts and stand-up comedians who have said in the past that the now-president-elect simply isn’t wacky enough for joke fodder. Remember how thrilled they were when he learned he was bad at bowling? They’ll have to be more creative now, as Canadian comedian Peter Cianfarini Twittered: Do you people have any idea how much more difficult you’ve made it for comedians? We needed McCain & Palin. I hope you’re all proud! Defeated veep candidate Sarah Palin, after all, will be associated with Canadian comedy for years to come.

1. And our official “best election tweet” award goes to Twitter user JHix, who wrote about his voting experience: Officially just played the worst video game ever. You mark people with an “x” and then wait almost forever to find out who won.

Read the rest here:
Ten election tweets worth remembering

We’ll have team coverage of the Web 2.0 Summit, which starts in San Francisco this morning. Look for analysis posts following the major talks and product launches, and tune in to our Twitter feed of happenings at the conference. Also, there will be live running commentary during a few key sessions. Check back here, on Webware.com, for live coverage:

All times are Pacific Standard, and subject to change.

See all the Web 2.0 Summit news

The rest is here:
Live blog schedule for Web 2.0 Summit

PBS and YouTube are encouraging U.S. voters to take something more than a sense of civic duty with them when they head to the polls on Nov. 4: they want them to take video cameras, too.

The Google-owned video site has partnered with PBS for “Video Your Vote,” a project that encourages voters to videotape their polling experience and upload it to the Web. Select videos will be shown on Jim Lehrer’s The NewsHour on PBS.

“Voters have documented each step of the 2008 election on YouTube and this phenomenon will culminate on November 4 as people head to the polls to determine the forty-fourth President of the United States,” Steve Grove, YouTube’s head of news and politics, said in a release Wednesday.

“This partnership with PBS, an organization known for offering rich perspectives, will help voters examine all aspects of voting from the registration processes, to reforms, to technology and election administration, to the actual casting of ballots.” Grove elaborated in a video interview with blog Beet.tv.

Gadget company Pure Digital Technologies has agreed to give away 1,000 of its Flip Video cameras to participants who agree to make nine short videos for Video Your Vote: three before voting, three at the polls, and three afterward. A few start-ups, like user-contributed news site GroundReport, have jumped on board as well and are also offering free Flip cameras to readers who participate.

YouTube has a separate campaign, in partnership with the U.S. Department of State, called the “Democracy Challenge.” That’s geared more toward aspiring filmmakers rather than voters armed with handheld cameras.

The video-sharing site already has a track record for political influence. In the 2006 mid-term elections, a widely circulated video of then-Senator George Allen using a bizarre racial epithet at a campaign rally made the rounds on YouTube, and according to some critics, it cost him the election.

But be careful: Some states have laws governing cameras at the polls. We don’t think “Google said it was O.K.” will be adequate defense.

See the rest here:
PBS, YouTube partner on Election Day project