Blogging

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we report on President Obama’s (non)-use of Twitter, take a look at the past decade in the media industry, review the latest statistics about blogging, question if Oxford Dictionary should’ve chosen “unfriend” as its word of the year, and more. We also check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

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Web Trends

Obama: “I Have Never Used Twitter”

Barack Obama spoke to a group of Chinese students this week at a town hall in Shanghai. The meeting was streamed live, worldwide on the Whitehouse website and on the Whitehouse’s Facebook page. He was asked a limited number of questions by the audience and one was about Twitter, which has been blocked in China since July. President Obama has never used Twitter, despite his account being the most followed there.

Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Democratization of News Media

It’s November 2009 and we’re nearing the end of a decade. It’s been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. The newspaper industry has been particularly affected by the Web. Over the past 10 years, news media has undergone a seachange akin to the invention of the printing press in 1440.

How Blogging Has Changed Over The Last 3 Years (Stats)

Reader engagement with blogs has changed dramatically over the last three years, primarily because of the rise of online social networks, according to new numbers released by analytics firm Postrank. Postrank published an analysis based on metrics for signals like comments, trackbacks, shared links and online bookmarks for the top 1000 most-engaging feeds online and for 100,000 randomly selected blog posts in each year since 2007.

Unfriending: Are People Online Shedding Friends? (Debate)

The New Oxford American Dictionary announced its Word of the Year this week. Its selection? unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook. Has Oxford Dictionary made the right selection? ReadWriteWeb’s Founder Richard MacManus thinks not. Marshall Kirkpatrick disagrees with him. Both make their cases in this post and invite you to cast your vote in a poll.

Do You Think “Unfriend” is a Good Word of the Year?(online surveys)

The Top 10 Mobile Applications of 2012

Research firm Gartner has put out a list of the top ten mobile applications of the future. Well, not the distant future, but the far off year of 2012. Nothing on the list is all that surprising or, in many cases, even all that new. Instead, the list includes the sorts of technologies that are just now coming into their own and haven’t yet seen widespread adoption as well as the already common technologies that are still experiencing growth.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations.

Google Sites Offers Templates; Claims It’s Easier Than Sharepoint

Google Sites is getting an upgrade. Starting this week, Google will provide templates that make it possible for users with no technical background to create web sites with a degree of functionality that includes page layouts, adding links for navigation and embedded gadgets. Templates are available for intranets, project sites, team sites, employee profile pages and other sites that people would use within the enterprise.

ReadWriteStart

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

Future of Music Coalition’s Brian Zisk: The Do’s of Streaming Music

In 2008 the idea of another subscription-only music service was enough to get your knickers in a torrent. Sure Rhapsody was doing well, but they’d been around for forever and in 2008, freemium was the music model du jour. With a year to reflect, co-founder of the Future of Music Coalition and longtime San Fran Music Tech Summit organizer Brian Zisk tells us what it takes to survive in today’s music environment.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

The Google Chrome OS Press Event

Google held a press event this week outlining more details about its Google Chrome OS. Google plans to launch Chrome OS next year. Google is positioning Chrome OS as “just a browser” – that is, all of your data is in the cloud. Chrome OS will be focused on speed, simplicity, security; every application on Chrome OS will be a web application. Google sees Chrome OS as targeting 3 trends: netbooks, cloud (everything is a web app today), phones getting computing capabilities.

Twitter.com Is Still the Most Popular Twitter Client – TweetDeck a Distant Second

Twitter’s own homepage is still the most popular tool for users to update their status on Twitter. Around 46% of all updates are made directly on the site. Social media analytics and monitoring service Sysomos analyzed 500 million tweets it collected over the past 5 months and found that TweetDeck is the most popular third-party client. TweetDeck has a comfortable lead with a 8.48% share of the market, followed by Tweetie, Twitterific and Seesmic.

A Central Nervous System for Earth: HP’s Ambitious Sensor Network

HP Labs has joined the race to build an infrastructure for the emerging Internet of Things. The giant computing and IT services company has announced a project that aims to be a “Central Nervous System for the Earth” (CeNSE). It’s a research and development program to build a planetwide sensing network, using billions of “tiny, cheap, tough and exquisitely sensitive detectors.”

Microsoft Launches Pivot, A Radically New Visualization of Online Objects

Microsoft Live Labs’ latest creation has just launched. Pivot is a fun, powerful discovery tool, built on Seadragon and powered by Silverlight, that runs in Vista or Windows 7 with IE8. It looks impressive and allows for truly intuitive exploration of information.

Droid Becomes Fastest-Selling Android Phone to Date

The Motorola Droid is the newest smartphone on the market to compete for the iPhone’s crown. Released by Verizon Wireless on November 6th, the Droid’s advertising campaign has been a full-frontal attack on the popular Apple smartphone with a heavy focus on what the iPhone doesn’t do. “iDon’t run simultaneous apps, iDon’t have a real keyboard, iDon’t take 5-megapixel pictures,” taunts Verizon’s Droid ad.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

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

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Weekly Wrapup: Google Chrome OS, Obama’s Twitter, Blogging Statistics, And More…

In a recent story about how Google creatively destroys markets, I said that only Google will run the servers for Wave, its re-think of e-mail. I was wrong about that, as Google reps took pains to tell me. I want to set the record straight. What Google is doing with the Wave communications architecture is important enough that it merits its own story, not just a strikeout in the original.

Google has said it will “federate” Wave. That means it will make it possible for anyone to operate their own Wave server and have it communicate with other Wave servers. This is just how e-mail works today: Anyone can run an e-mail server that can send messages to and receive messages from any other e-mail system. The Internet routes messages from server to server.

In contrast, only Google runs the Gmail servers.

Google's Wave architecture does not rely on Google servers. Click image for link to Google's whitepaper.

(Credit: Google)

I was told that anyone will be able to “build their own Wave server without involvement from Google.” That means corporations and governments will be able to deploy their own instances of Wave inside their secure firewalls if they like, and decide how or if they want to open up their servers to the outside world. For businesses with strict data retention and auditing requirements (e.g., all public companies, governmental agencies, health care businesses, etc.), this also means that they’ll be able to write in software to meet their needs; or that other companies will be able to create and sell Wave servers. (If, that is, business gets behind Wave at all.)

However, sources familiar with the intricacies of building a real-time synchronization engine, which is what Wave is, tell me that it is incredibly challenging to make such a system work “at scale.” Showing off a Wave demo is one thing. But a successful, well-performing, wide-scale rollout requires advanced technology that few companies have the chops to write, and it’s hard to keep performance up as the size of the user community grows. This may be why the original planned release of Wave to developers outside Google has been delayed by several days.

Wave will be based on (and extend on) the existing messaging standard, XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol). So a lot of Web developers will be able to get started quickly on writing Wave extensions and apps, as well as building their own servers to run Wave or back-end services for their Wave plug-ins.

Wave may represent new thinking about packaging real-time communication, but it’s not based on 100 percent new or proprietary technology, so we might see some interesting third-party extensions to Wave very shortly after it starts rolling out to the public.

I stand by the rest of my story, especially my main thesis: Google destroys entrenched markets. That’s not a bad thing, though. Especially when it comes to e-mail.

See more here:
Google won’t run all the Wave servers

Microsoft Vine looks like an odd social experiment. It’s designed to help users send notifications to the people they need to reach in emergencies. I tried the product and found it very un-Microsoft-like. It’s useless as a single-user app, and it’s also oddly specific in its functionality. From Microsoft, I expect broad platforms and wide-open productivity tools. Vine is neither.

Or is it? I took my questions to Microsoft, and was routed to a person whose title made it clear that there’s more going on with Vine than the product initially reveals. I ended up talking with Tammy Savage, general manager of the Microsoft Public Safety Initiative.

Tammy Savage, general manager of the Microsoft Public Safety Initiative.

(Credit: Microsoft)

At its core, Vine is based on a new Microsoft platform for routing communications between different systems. The platform is built to know the various ways there are to reach anyone using it, and it tries multiple methods until it gets its message through.

For example, some emergency messages might go to users’ e-mail accounts or be sent as text messages. Some may go to regular telephones, and will get converted from text to speech if necessary. If one communication method goes down (if calls can’t go through after a big disaster, for instance) the platform routes messages over another until they reach enough people to satisfy the requirements of the message.

Rules dictate to whom a message goes. An emergency message to check on a child when a parent is unable to after an earthquake, for example, might only require one person who gets the message to reply to it in the affirmative to satisfy the rule. A note about a kids’ soccer game being canceled due to a muddy field would keep bouncing through the system until all the parents got it.

To keep the product in front of users, so they don’t forget about when they need it, Vine also lets you track local news, and it can be used it to “check in” when you’re traveling, even if you’re not in the middle of an emergency. See (Meet Vine for more.)

Vine reaches deep

Vine lets you send ordinary updates as well as emergency alerts.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The current private beta version requires that all users download an app, which is a pretty serious limitation for a product that’s supposed to reach emergency contacts, some of whom might not be Vine users. Savage said there won’t be a download requirement when the product hits Version 1.

However, the app itself could have an important purpose. It might become a node in a mesh network enabling messages to hop between users’ computers as the platform tries to deliver emergency notifications. That’s an ambitious goal, but it’s something an operating system vendor could potentially do. (On September 14, 2001, writing for Red Herring, I proposed a peer-to-peer emergency communications network that could be used when Web news sites were overloaded, as they were on September 11.)

“Our intent,” Savage says, “is to create something that will hold up in an emergency, but getting to that point is a process, and a long-term play.” Microsoft is a good place to build this, she says: “You can’t design a system that survives in a long-term scenario with a small investment.”

So the Vine app, as it is today, is the tip of the iceberg. “We consider ourselves an integration layer,” Savage says. Vine will be a “service of services,” a switchboard to intelligently connect communication systems to each other, to connect people when it’s critical to do so. It’ll connect e-mail, IM, Twitter, SMS, landline phones, cars using OnStar, satellite phones, you name it.

Off balance

Savage also says Vine is built on a new model of understanding emergency communications. As she says, “The old model is, you sound an alarm to get people off balance. Then you provide them with a path to get on balance. This top-down model works well when the threat is understood, the authority is trusted, and peoples’ behavior is visceral.”

But today that’s not the case. Emergencies take new forms, people often don’t trust authority, and there’s so much communication noise that it’s hard for an authoritarian message to break through. Savage says the way people
react to emergency alerts when the reaction isn’t visceral is to see what people around them are doing.

Her example: You’re in a hotel and the fire alarm goes off. What do you do? Most people poke their head out of their door. If other people are running for the exits, they will too. But if nobody’s reacting, or people are just slowly ambling out, they’ll imitate that behavior. Vine, Savage says, “will give people the proverbial door that can be opened to look around. We’re building infrastructure that can be bottom-up and sideways, so messages get through, so we can create nonlinear information sharing in a time of crisis.”

I suggested to Savage that Twitter is becoming this non-linear emergency communication channel. She agreed in principle, but said, “We want to include it. But we need more advanced capabilities. We want to know what’s circular reporting and what’s original.”

Ultimately, this is a business for Microsoft, not just a public service. There are budgets for emergency response programs at all levels of government and in many businesses. Savage says Microsoft’s first business effort with Vine is “bottoms-up” –local churches, schools, police stations. “Because those are the entities that citizens really trust.” She says it’s harder to build the business this way (although have you tried getting federal grant dollars?) but she thinks the technology will be more useful than if it’s implemented top-down. “Grassroots is where this has to happen,” says the Microsoft chief of emergency response platforms.

See the original post here:
Microsoft Vine could save your hide

Just in case you’re not getting enough up-to-the-minute news about swine flu, you can log in to Twitter to get updates from the government’s Centers for Disease Control.

The CDC is using Twitter to spread the word on how not to spread or get swine flu. The CDC has several Twitter accounts including @CDCemergency, which is posting new recommendations, bulletins on confirmed cases, and information on antiviral drugs and other ways to deal with or prevent the disease.

The Associated Press reports that there have been more than 1,600 reported cases and the number of suspected deaths has reached 149 in Mexico. At 1 p.m. Eastern Monday, the CDC reported 40 confirmed cases in the United States: California (7), Kansas (2), New York City (28), Ohio (1), and Texas (2). One person has been hospitalized, but there have been no deaths.

Another Twitter account, @CDC-eHealth, is updated less often but has some good advice including this link to a CDC site where you can send family and friends a “handwashing eCard.”

You can also search Twitter for “swine flu” where you’ll find a lot of tweets, but use caution before taking advice from sources that you have no particular reason to trust.

And there is indeed plenty of discussion about the disease. Nielsen Online released data that shows that the volume of conversations about swine flu “have already exceeded nearly 10 to 1 those surrounding the salmonella and peanut butter scares from earlier this winter.”

Of course all general news organizations have information including our own CBSNews.com which has an excellent and relatively reassuring video from “CBS Evening News” M.D. Dr. John LaPook. (CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.)

WebMD.com has a swine flu FAQ and as Don Reisinger pointed out in a Webware post about online resources for tracking swine flu, Google has a map that tracks locations of cases around the world.

From my own experience, using the Web to get health information can be quite useful but it can also lead to unnecessary panic. It’s a great way to get general information, prevention tips, and information on how to handle a known condition, but be cautious when using it to try to diagnose yourself. When you do online research about symptoms, you are likely to find a wide variation of causes from the benign to deadly. Yes, a cough can be a symptom of lung cancer, but it can also be from a common cold. If I do suspect something is wrong, I usually go to a doctor, not a URL. If you do go online for health information be sure it’s a reputable site like WebMD, one of the state or federal government sites (including healthfinder.gov), or a site run by a respected health care provider.

Updated to include link to number of cases and links to Nielsen Online data.

View original here:
CDC using Twitter for swine flu information

Use coupon code 'SAVE' to get $25 vouchers for $3.

(Credit: Restaurant.com)

Hungry? Like to dine out? Restaurant.com normally lets you buy $25 gift certificates for $10, but right now you can scoop them up for just $3 apiece. Simply enter coupon code SAVE when you get to the shopping cart.

Anyone familiar with Restaurant.com knows there are usually a few small strings attached, like a minimum food or drink purchase. However, it’s not like you have to order a case of wine or anything. And you can print the coupon right on your own printer: It’s immediately ready for use.

A few months back I used one of the gift certificates for a local Italian place, and except for a slight delay while the manager called to verify the coupon, everything went smoothly.

In these horrendous economic times, this deal is too good to pass up. Just make sure to read all the terms and conditions before you buy your certificates, just so you avoid any nasty surprises when the check comes. Bon appetit!

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Get a $25 restaurant gift certificate for $3