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Weekly Wrapup: Google Chrome OS, Obama's Twitter, Blogging Statistics, And More...

Richard MacManus — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 05:00:00 -0800

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.

Discuss

3 Great Light Blogging Tools Compared

Dana Oshiro — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:35:59 -0800

Once the service for those serious enough to pay for the privilege to post, TypePad recently released a free "Micro" service. The company made the decision to offer a free product realizing the demand for a platform more formal than Twitter and less formal than Wordpress or Typepad's original product. ReadWriteWeb compared TypePad's Micro against 2 other leading light blogging tools. Below are our thoughts:

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TypePad Micro: In addition to being able to blog via email, iPhone app, "Blog It" bookmarklet and the general WYSIWYG dashboard, this tool also allows users to cross post to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook. My only complaint with TypePad is that there are only 2 design themes to choose from. For someone like me with very little design sense, it's a long process to find something right. As well, if you'd like to add another blog or add new design themes you are required to pay for a monthly subscription service.

Tumblr: This service offers users publishing via iPhone app, desktop widget, the Tumblr bookmarklet, text message, email, AIM and even via audio call-in. Tumblr's theme gallery offers hundreds of options for design. Users can also add their posts to Facebook and Twitter via the free customization. Tumblr allows users to create more than one blog and add more than one contributor for free; however, all edits show up in the same dashboard in chronological order. This means you may have to dig to revise an older post.

Posterous: Posterous is the original email publishing microblog. Users can email posts, publish them via the web editor or upload them from the PicPosterous iPhone app. The service allows users to set up auto posting to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Vimeo, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress and Xanga. You can also choose to post to just one service in addition to your Posterous account by emailing flickr@posterous.com to specify Flickr or twitter@posterous.com to post to Twitter. Of the three services, Posterous offers an advantage in its ease-of-use and while it's lacked design abilities in the past, the company recently launched themes and theme import from Tumblr.

Other notable light blogging services include Soup.io, Vox and Noovo. If we've missed your favorite service let us know in the comments below.

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An iPhone Visualization App That Syncs with the Cloud

Alex Williams — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:50:41 -0800

Roambi announced a pro version of its iPhone application this week that syncs with Salesforce.com and other cloud-based services or on-premsie sales environments. It's a visualization application, providing mobile workers with a pretty cool way to see sales information.

Integration is by far one of the most significant trends we are seeing in the enterprise space. It's a wave, really, marked this week by Salesforce.com and its move to turn the Force.com development platform into a service that makes all of its applications social.

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A good example of this trend are small companies like Roambi that can now reach into the enterprise by integrating with Salesforce.com and other cloud platforms like Google Apps.

We caught up with the founders of Roambi for a quick demo of their new pro product and how it syncs with both on-premse applications and SaaS services.

Discuss

8tracks to Launch Playback API and Developer Program

Dana Oshiro — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:00:00 -0800

It appears that the time for freemium music services in the US has passed. Earlier this week streaming music site Imeem sold to MySpace for under $10 million dollars while laying off a large number of staff. For a company with all four major record labels signed, more than 15 million uniques a month and well over 5 million tracks in its catalogue, it came as a sobering blow to the industry. While many companies move to a subscription model, 8tracks continues to forge along in what some describe as a convenient loophole. As of this weekend the company is publicly launching its API for Boston's Music Hack Day.

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Similar to the original concept for Muxtape, 8tracks allows users to trade 30 min (8 track) playlists. But unlike Muxtape, because 8tracks songs are not identified prior to play, the company is treated as an internet radio station. This status as a radio station means that it avoids the high licensing fees plaguing the streaming music sites. While Muxtape was forced to close in 2008, 8tracks continues to thrive.

This weekend 8tracks is publicly launching its music playback API in the hopes of leveraging the collective brain power of Music Hack Day attendees. Some of the tools already built using the API that will be demoed include an iPhone player, a player widget for Facebook and a weekly Hype Machine mix. For those interested in getting involved with 8tracks on Music Hack Day, the developer API is available tomorrow at developer.8tracks.com.

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Memento: Protocol-Based Time Travel for the Web

Frederic Lardinois — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:45:49 -0800

The Web constantly changes and evolves. That, of course, is what makes the Internet so exciting, but it also means that finding older versions of a website is hard. The current push towards the real-time web is making this problem even more apparent. Memento, a project based at Old Dominion University, wants to make it easier to access older versions of a web page without having to go to the Internet Archive. To do this, the project is using a relatively obscure feature of the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP).

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The Memento project wants to give browsers a 'time-travel' mode. Currently, the only way to find these pages is the Wayback Machine. According to an interview with Memento's Herbert Van de Sompel, the mission of this project is to make it far easier for users to find older pages without having to go through the hassle of putting the right URL into the Wayback Machine's search engine.

HTTP Content Negotiation

To do this, Van de Sompel and his colleagues are exploiting a feature in the HTTP content negotiation specs that allows them to add date-and-time negotiation to the standard negotiations that already happen whenever your browser connects to a web server. Instead of just asking for the current page, a Memento-enabled browser can also ask for an older version of that page. Some servers and content management systems already offer this feature and the Memento project has developed a demo that shows how this feature would look. According to Van de Sompel, it only takes four extra lines of codes in Apache to make this work.

While it is relatively easy for browsers to ask for an older version of a web page, content owners would have to store these older versions of their sites on their servers as well. With static sites, this is easy to do, but today's highly dynamic web doesn't make it easy to create an archival version of every page.

You can find more technical information about how the team envisions the future of the Memento project in this paper.

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The Future Is All About Context: The Pragmatic Web

Guest Author — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:14:15 -0800

The semantic Web has long been heralded as the future of the Web. Proponents have said that Web experiences will some day become more meaningful and relevant based on the AI-esque computational power of natural-language processing (NLP) and structured data that is understandable by machines for interpretation.

However, with the rise of the social Web, we see that what truly makes our online experiences meaningful is not necessarily the Web's ability to approximate human language or to return search results with syntactical exactness. The value of the semantic Web will take time because the intelligent personal agents that are able to process this structured data still have a long way to go before becoming fully actualized.

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This guest post was written by Alisa Leonard-Hansen.

Rather, meaningful and relevant experiences now are born out of the context of our identities and social graph: the pragmatics, or contextual meaning, of our online identities. My Web experience becomes more meaningful and relevant to me when it is layered with contextual social data based on my identity. This is the pragmatic Web.

We need to better understand our identity as it begins to define our experience of the Web and the networked-enabled world we inhabit. Our online identity will increasingly be defined by three "pillars": who I say I am, what I do and say, and who I connect to (and who connects to me).

To clarify, our online identities are comprised primarily of three specific kinds of data:

Explicit or prescriptive data (i.e. the data that I input about myself: name, age, occupation, etc.);
Activity or behavioral data (i.e. what I do and say online);
Relationship data (i.e. my social graph and what my connections say about me).

If we consider the power of this pragmatic Web (a highly relevant and individualized Web experience based on the ubiquity of our identity data), we find that it not only impacts individual user experience, but that it opens up entirely new opportunities for business online. The future is not "business as usual." Business models will be based on what Elias Bizannes of the Data Portability Project calls the "information value network-economic value," derived from services that focus on activities with comparative advantage and that leverage free access to data.

Consider this: as media companies scramble to identify new and innovative ways to advertise to the sea of nameless, pixeled users who graze through their content each day, a rich supply of highly valuable identity data lies just beneath the surface, left unmeasured and unmonetized.

Facebook is nothing more than perhaps the largest single database of this kind of online identity data: explicit, activity and relationship data. With the development of Facebook Connect, which allows for the "open" exchange of Facebook user data between Facebook and third parties, Facebook could conceivably (and will) create an Facebook Connect ad network (read: data exchange), supplied by the valuable and highly targetable user identity data that is currently siloed on Facebook's servers. This identity data within Facebook is what makes the activity in "social media" so valuable.

But the centralization of identity data on one or two major networks (such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace) won't realize the vision of the pragmatic Web. So, how will the pragmatic Web come to be? How do we realize the power of a dynamic Web that is based on our identities? We do so by empowering individuals to access and control their identity across any site or service, through standards that enable data portability and open Web inter-operability. The resulting vision is that of a highly personalized, dynamic, relevant and remixable Web experience, yielding greater access to information through discovery, communication and collaboration. For enterprise, this could mean the rise of innovative new business models, based on data-driven value exchange.

One final note on identity data as it relates to enterprise. As Bizannes points out, the value of this kind of identity data rests on the key factors of time and timeliness. Essentially, identity data is valuable only if it is recent. Facebook wouldn't be able to sell your (permissions-enabled) data to advertisers if it used your explicit data from a year ago rather than from today. So, Bizannes argues that real-time "access" to someone's identity matters most, and it's no longer about data "capture." Thus, as new business models arise out of monetizing permissions-enabled identity data, the value of the business models will depend on these entities having real-time access to the data.

Guest author: Alisa Leonard-Hansen is a digital strategist and Social Media Evangelist at iCrossing, a leading global digital agency. She is also the Communications Chair for the Data Portability Project and blogs about the social Web on her blog, TheWebisSocial.com. Follow her on Twitter @alisamleo.

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FastPencil: Turn Your Blog Posts into a Published Book

Frederic Lardinois — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:42:43 -0800

Writing a book will never be easy, but FastPencil's mission is to make things easier for authors by bringing this process online and to collaborate with others. FastPencil takes writers from idea to published book. The service offers features for collaboration, editing and design, as well as professional consulting services for authors. One cool feature of FastPencil is that it can import blog posts and turn them into books and e-books that bloggers can then sell through all the major book distribution channels.

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Features

The areas where FastPencil exceeds are online editing, collaboration and distribution. Fast Pencil offers a surprisingly comprehensive online editing suite. While this editor isn't quite as fully-featured as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice or Apple's Pages - there is no feature to create headlines or tables of content, for example - it's more than enough to power the service's online collaboration tools.

In it's latest update, which launched earlier this week, FastPencil introduced a number of interesting new features. These include new templates, new roles for collaborators (co-authors, project managers) and forums for prospective authors to meet and discuss their work.

Turn Your Blog Into a Book

If you import your blog feed, FastPencil will turn every blog post into a chapter. The service also imports images from these posts. These images have to be inserted at the beginning or end of a post, however. You can't have your text flow around an image.

Publishing: Hardcover, Paperback, E-Book

Once you have finished your book, you can publish it as an e-book and printed book. These services, however, do cost. These paid services include printing, obtaining ISBN numbers, and organizing the distribution of your book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ingram Digital and other retail partners. FastPencil also offers a number of editing services like design, illustration and editing services. Besides printing hardcover and paperback books, FastPencil can format books for virtually any digital platform, including DRM-free ePub e-books and the Kindle.

Don't Need All These Services? Try SmashWords

If you don't need all of these services from Fast Pencil - or if you have already finished your book - another service worth looking at is SmashWords. Smashwords specializes in e-books. Thanks to deals with Barnes & Noble and Sony in the US and Indigo Books & Music's Shortcovers in Canada, self-published authors can get their e-books into traditional distribution channels, or sell their books directly on SmashWords. Smashwords acquired the New Zealand-based e-book self-publishing service BookHabit earlier this week.
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Was Chrome OS a Disappointment?

Sarah Perez — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:28:27 -0800

It's the morning after the big Chrome OS event where Google executives and engineers revealed a myriad of details about the company's first attempt at creating their own operating system. The highly anticipated news conference was tracked all over the web, liveblogged by technology sites, and Twittered so much that it's still listed as a "trending topic" as of this morning.

But now that the news is out, has Chrome OS lost its shine? People had high expectations for Google's new operating system but the end result doesn't look like the revolutionary, "change the world" product many had hoped for.

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Yes, Chrome OS is Different

Don't get us wrong - Google's OS is different than whatever Windows, Mac, or Linux build you have running on your computer today. The new OS does away with desktop applications entirely - everything you use on Google Chrome OS runs on the web. Of course, the company hopes you'll use a lot of Google products like Gmail and YouTube, but it doesn't limit you to just Google-branded services. In the built-in applications area, there are also links to other web apps like the online TV streaming service Hulu.com and music sites Lala and Pandora. To be fair, Chrome OS even links to Yahoo and Microsoft's webmail offerings right out of the box.

Google's major goal with Chrome OS is to moving computing off our personal hard drives and into the cloud...the Google cloud. To accomplish such a feat, they've made the web browser the OS. Everything you need (in theory) is accessible through the included Google Chrome browser, the same browser the company currently offers to Windows users with Mac and Linux versions expected by the end of this year.

As exciting as that vision is, we have to wonder if people - especially the mainstream netbook users the OS is aimed at - are ready for this big of a switch. And more importantly, is the technology itself ready to make the change a comfortable and seamless experience?

...but is it Better?

After digesting yesterday's news, some lingering questions remain. Was this the OS everyone was hoping for or has Google let us down?

You Can't Just Install Chrome OS - You Have to Buy a New Netbook

To begin with, one of the more surprising reveals that came out of yesterday's news is that the OS cannot be installed on your own computer. Oh sure, there are downloads available that use Google's open-sourced code to create bootable builds tech-savvy users and developers can play with, but the official word from the search giant is that anyone wanting to use the "real" Google Chrome OS will have to purchase a new netbook to do so. You cannot simply download it from the web and install it on any machine.

Part of the reason for this restriction is driver support. Google is working with carefully selected manufacturers to offer a handful of netbooks running the OS in the coming year. By going this route, they don't have to provide an entire ecosystem of drivers for every piece of hardware out there - they can pick and choose which ones to support. They'll likely limit the number of peripherals supported, too. According to what was said yesterday, the company will support "mass storage devices" (think USB flash drives and digital cameras) but were cagey on how they plan on offering printing support. All they would say is that they're planning on an "innovative approach" when it comes to printing, whatever that means. Hopefully, they're planning to do something more than just integrating with Kinko's and FedEx's online document services, for example. Printing, (sorry Google) is not a web app just yet.

No Other Web Browsers Supported

Another big disappointment is the company's decision to limit all web surfing to the one included browser, Google Chrome. Firefox and Safari users are out of luck - no other browsers will be supported. But before you cry out "antitrust!," be warned - Google has this covered. The code base used to build the OS is open-source - that means anyone take the code and create their own version of Chrome OS. As was carefully - and haltingly - explained by Google's VP of Product Management, Sundar Pichai, other browser makers can take the code and build their own OS if they want to. But let's get real - Firefox Chrome OS? We don't think so. The reality is that fans of other browsers are simply out of luck if they want to use this operating system.

Offline Access is Limited. Your New Netbook is Now a Brick.

One of the questions that got glossed over during the Q&A session at the end of the event is how Google's OS plans to deal with offline access. The world is not blanketed in Wi-Fi yet, so what can this web-based OS do without the web? Surprisingly, the answer given didn't refer to any subsidized deals with cellular providers regarding deals to offer built-in 3G connectivity for the new netbooks. Instead, Pichai explained that the OS was built for use with Wi-Fi.

Of course, a handful of Google products use Google Gears, a technology that makes websites available offline. For example, Gmail uses Gears to create an offline version of your webmail inbox which you can use to read and respond to email until internet connectivity becomes available again. At that point, all the changes are synced back to Google's servers. Although Google didn't specifically refer to Gears when answering the question, there's no reason to doubt that it will work in Chrome OS's web browser the same as it does now in the standard Chrome browser.

However, Pichai did make note of Chrome OS's support for HTML5, an upcoming revision to the core markup language used to build the web. In the new specification, a key feature is offline support for web apps. However, web application developers will have to rebuild their apps in order to use HTML5, so users will be dependent on each individual company to make this change. While it's believed that one day this spec could make the whole web an offline app, the reality is that most developers have yet to implement this technology in their services yet. Even by Chrome OS's launch next year, there's no reason to believe the landscape will have changed significantly by then.

Do You Really Need an OS or Just the Chrome Web Browser?

Finally, the big question regarding Chrome OS is why? What can the OS do that any operating system running the Chrome browser cannot? Based on what was shown yesterday, the answer is very little. Chrome OS's brand-new features consist of two things: application tabs and panels. The panels are persistent windows that pop-up in front of your web browser's main window. For example, Google Chat, the company's IM service, can live in a panel that stays on top no matter what window you're viewing.

Application tabs, meanwhile, are special tabs that give you easy access to your most frequently used web apps from the browser. Any page tab can be made into an application tab with one click and the resulting "tab" is represented with the colorful icon for that site or service. While that's certainly a cool feature, it alone isn't a major selling point for the OS. That would be like saying you have to buy Mac OS X because of the dock or Windows because of the taskbar. You need a million of these little features combined to add up to a compelling reason to buy an OS.

That's not to say that Chrome OS itself doesn't have worthwhile features of its own - like its built-in security mechanisms or its auto-update system, it's just that these aren't the kinds of things that sell it to an end user. The questions consumers want answers to are what does it do that's special? What does it look like? And for now, the answer is "it's basically just a web browser."

Revolution? Maybe Not Just Yet.

At the end of the day, Chrome OS is an exciting, but not fully realized, vision. Although it has potential, the world may not be ready for a web-based netbook right now. Also, the technology needed to make the Wi-Fi only netbook useful without an internet connection isn't up to full speed either. At the end of the day, the netbook will be marginally more useful than an iPod Touch - when connected, it's amazing. Offline, not so much.

While you might not rush right out to buy a Chrome OS netbook when they first launch, there could come a time - sooner than you think - when it becomes a reasonable choice. When the majority of apps work offline and you've fully transitioned away from desktop apps, a web-connected netbook, especially one that's affordable, could easily become your everyday computer. That day hasn't arrived yet. For now, Chrome OS is an exciting glimpse at the future of computing, but not a practical device for the majority of users.

Disclosure: Sarah Perez freelances for Microsoft's Channel 10 blog, but is not a Microsoft employee. Her primary web browser is, in fact, Google Chrome which she uses exclusively.
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Adobe's Upgrades Acrobat.com, Launches New Mobile App

Sarah Perez — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:43:30 -0800

Adobe's online office suite, Acrobat.com, is getting its first major upgrade since the service left beta back in June of this year. The new release, launching tomorrow, is an entirely unified experience thanks to the addition of a much-requested file organization tool, explains the service's Director of Project Management Rick Treitman.

Also new are 35 user-requested features, including file searching capabilities and integrations with web services like Flickr and Google Image Search. However, one of the most exciting pieces to the upgraded service is the newly launched mobile component. With Acrobat.com's smartphone application, users won't just have access to their files on the go - they can also scan in new documents with their phone's camera.

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The New File Organizer

The one major new feature in this release of Acrobat.com is the file organizer. Before, files could live in three different places on the service. Now all files are accessible through one main interface.

The file organizer itself includes some handy features, too. Instead of using a traditional folder structure like you have on your computer's hard drive, the service introduces something called "collections." These are more like iTunes playlists than file folders (or even labels in Gmail) because files can be assigned to multiple collections instead of having to sit in just one folder.

Another key component to the organizer is a file search tool. Believe it or not, the online service had no way of helping you find your files until now. Although the current search capabilities don't yet offer full text search of your documents, Adobe says that may come further down the road.

Also new is the organizer's "import and edit" feature which lets you open external files directly into the appropriate program so you can begin to work on them online. In the past, you had to first launch the program, then import the file. This time-saving step is more akin to what rival Google Docs offers via their upload feature except that in Acrobat.com, you don't have to click a link to open the uploaded file - it happens automatically.

Other New Features

The various online office programs themselves have seen improvements as well in this new release. Buzzword is leaving beta and now it, along with Presentations, lets you import images from online services like Flickr and Google Images in addition to the images found on your computer. One drawback to this feature, though, is that the online image searches don't offer filtering by license type, so a user could easily get into trouble by adding a copyrighted or otherwise licensed photo into their document if they neglect to check permissions first.

The Tables app, still in beta, now has the ability to do more data sorting and filtering. It also adds new views including a print layout view that shows what the document will look like on the printed page.

Acrobat.com Comes to iPhone, Blackberry

One of the more exciting developments is the new Acrobat.com mobile application which will be made available to Blackberry and iPhone users shortly. Built in conjunction with a company called scanR, the mobile application lets users take advantage of their mobile phone's camera to add new files to the service. After taking the photo, the app uses OCR technology to convert the image to text. How well this works is unknown at this time because the app has not yet arrived in the respective app stores.

The app also lets users view their files in a read-only mode, convert them to PDFs, and share them with others via fax or email. There will be two versions of the app made available - a free version and a premium offering which will allow for more PDF conversions and faxes.

According to Adobe, the Acrobat.com service is faring well. They already have 6 million users and add around 100,000 more each week. While a lot of users are students and SMB owners looking for a free alternative to more expensive Microsoft Office software, the company says they're also seeing the service picked up and used in small workgroups at larger companies. However, Adobe admits that they're not an enterprise play yet and they also won't reveal how many people use the premium version of the service - only that they're "happy" with the number thus far.

If you want to try the upgraded online suite, you can do so at www.acrobat.com as of tomorrow (Saturday, November 21st) at 6 AM EST.
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Sponsor Post: Build a Better Personal Brand With Your Own Domain

Admin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:00:57 -0800

Editor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

The concept of personal branding online has become a part of many conversations about social media and social networking recently. The popularity of social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and various smaller niche sites has continued to skyrocket, offering individuals a chance to create a more robust online presence. The age of anonymity online has all but ended, and individuals should seek to gain further control of their online identities.

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A great deal has been written about how to engage in social media to establish a name for yourself online, but a commonly overlooked piece of the puzzle is also one of the simplest: owning your own domain name. A domain name complements the rest of your online presence through branding, using yourname.com or a similar variation.

Some Personal Branding Background

Personal branding is inherently somewhat egotistical, but not necessarily more so than networking at a conference or sharing business cards. The influence that personal branding online can have has continued to grow as people change the way they seek and consume information. Just over a decade ago, social circles were limited to face-to-face interactions and numbers in a phone book. Now, you can have a much larger reach and audience online. Think of personal branding simply as conducting some marketing as the president of Brand You.

The key to successfully branding yourself online is sharing. This could include contributing valuable information to an online conversation, creating original content, passing along great content from others or sharing knowledge from your experiences. Whatever your interests, social networking provides the opportunity to connect with others who share those same interests and want to hear what you have to say. The tools you can use are nearly infinite, but some of the larger social sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are great places to start if you're not already there.

Where a Domain Fits With Personal Branding

Whether you're just starting out online or you're a social media power user who has more social profiles than you can keep track of, a domain is an essential part of owning your brand online. Domains were around long before social networking sites, but many people have never owned one, and they're more relevant now than ever. Owning a domain is very affordable, at under $10 per year, and well worth the cost as long as you put it to use. If you don't already own yourname.com, do a domain search to see if it's available. If yourname.com is already taken, the .net or .me extensions are also great options for a personal site. If all else fails, you can use a middle initial, nickname or other variation. Once you've found the perfect domain, consider registering other extensions (.net, .org, .tel, etc.) as well and redirect them to your primary domain.

Once you own your domain, you might wonder how best to use it. The option that comes to mind for many people is to build a website. If you have some knowledge of HTML or a website-building program, then creating a basic website is relatively simple. Content management systems like WordPress and Joomla are increasingly popular among people who want to build personal websites or blogs without learning HTML or Web coding. Here are just a few ideas of what you can do with a personal website:

Showcase your work in an online personal portfolio.

Build an online resume that highlights your strengths and creativity.

Make a website that features your hobbies and interests.

Create a hub that links to all of your social networking profiles.

Start a blog about a professional field or subject that you have expertise in.

If you don't want to create a website or blog with your own domain, there are still many other uses for it:

Brand yourself with custom email (you@yourname.com). You can even hook up services like Gmail to your domain using MX records, if you don't want to use separate email hosting.

If you already have a blog set up with a service like Blogger, Posterous or WordPress.com, use URL forwarding to direct visitors to that blog when they type in your domain.

Forward your domain to your Facebook, Twitter or other primary social networking profile.

Regardless of what you use the domain for, connecting your name to your online presence is important. When you connect with someone in your everyday life, you can share your domain name rather than having them search for you on Facebook. Use your domain on business cards, resume and other professional materials. Whatever the purpose, your domain can be an essential part of your online identity, without you having to rely on numerous online profiles. As Marshall Kirkpatrick puts it, "I'm in charge here at Marshallk.com and that's the way I like it."

Why Create a Personal Brand Online?

Personal branding has a great number of applications, particularly in the professional world. If you're searching for a job, having a well-rounded online presence is an increasingly important factor that many companies consider. Businesses often take more than a peek at what comes up in Google search results for candidates, whether you think they should or not, so use your domain name to rank well in Google to put the content that you want potential employers to see front and center.

Similarly, use your domain and social media profiles to network on a professional or personal level with others who share the same interests and goals. If you have consistently useful knowledge and content to contribute online, you can come to be known as an influencer and thought leader in your field. If you aim to start your own business or new project, having an established presence and network of online connections that trusts you can make a huge difference in your ability to succeed. Regardless of the direction you take with personal branding, a domain name is a great place to start and can serve as the backbone of your online presence.

Have another innovative use for your domain? Please share it in the comments.
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Cisco iPhone Security App Reaches Across the Network

Alex Williams — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:49:34 -0800

iPhones are becoming a standard in the enterprise. And with the the iPhones, we are seeing a number of applications for a variety of different uses.

The latest is an application for security managers made by Cisco. The application alerts managers to threats in the enterprise so they may respond in real-tme to incidents that merit attention. It's now available in the iTunes store.

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Threats to the enterprise come in all forms. Malware is perhaps the biggest concern for security managers. Its various forms are constantly changing.

The Cisco app is networked to its Security Intelligence Operation (SIO). This group has different functions. It includes a threat monitoring network that includes 700,000 globally deployed Cisco security devices; a database of 40,000 vulnerabilities and 3,300 IPS signatures. Third-party data feeds are also watched. The SIO also includes a global team of more than 500 security analysts.

Real-time updates deliver information to the security manager.This information includes information from security devices, along with best-practice recommendations and other information for tracking threats and analyzing intelligence.
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Let My P2P Go: Uncle Sam Eyes File Sharing Again

Jolie O'Dell — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:00:43 -0800

In the wake of a leak of an international trade agreement on online file-sharing and copyright violation, U.S. House representatives are introducing legislation to curtail the greatest of American freedoms: the illegal download.

Let's not kid ourselves, dear readers. P2P's best use cases all revolve around the liberation of data, software, music, movies, and other copyrighted and rather expensive content. You may direct your angry emails to Rep. Edolphus Towns (NY-Dem.), who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

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Towns is sponsoring the Federal Secure File-Sharing Act. Click the link and read it.

At the outset, the bill proposes the banning of P2P software use for government employees and contractors "and for other purposes." The bill mandates the long-term examination of "each open-network peer-to-peer file sharing software program" that might currently be in use by government and law enforcement personnel.

Towns cited the exposure of sensitive information via such networks as the reason for the bill. He cited the following leaks as proof of the need for stricter P2P regulations:

Schematics for the President's helicopter, Marine One.

Financial data on Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.

Location of a U.S. Secret Service safe house for the First Family.

Specifics of a House Ethics Committee document containing a list of ongoing investigations

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But let us be realistic: Copyright claims, Creative Commons concerns, and IP violations are the molten core at the center of any legislation on P2P networks. And based on recent internationally agreed-upon efforts to uphold the claims and wishes of copyright holders, the U.S. government seems to be introducing yet more legislation to restrict piracy.

Are P2P networks truly responsible for such serious security breaches? Or are these claims merely politically motivated scapegoats for government to crack down on user behaviors - behaviors that may need more examination than legal discipline?

Most importantly, if this bill is made law, will it act as a precedent for stricter policing and eventual shutdown of P2P networks altogether? Or are we reactionary skeptics who need to calm down and quietly resume our download of our Hello, Dolly torrent files? Choose your own adventure in the comments.
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The Brain Chip Cometh, & It Cometh from Intel

Jolie O'Dell — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:00:12 -0800

Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick's dreaded brain chip for controlling computers and mobile devices may be closer than even he suspected.

Intel researchers in Pittsburgh told journalists today that brain implants are harnessing human brain waves to surf the Internet, manipulate documents, and much more. And just as we told you two years ago, the lucky recipients of these implants will be willing volunteers, not government-controlled guinea pigs. Some of us are now researching cheap flights to Pittsburgh.

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Just think of how far we've come since the early days of portable tech. "If you told people 20 years ago that they would be carrying computers all the time," said Intel research VP Andrew Chien, "they would have said, 'I don't want that. I don't need that.' Now you can't get them to stop."

Indeed, mobility, transparency, and accessibility are all the terms of the hour; and their advocates are popular laureates. The forefront of the user interface has revolved around concepts such as intuition, organics, and biology.

Gesture technology is removing one barrier that lies between human-to-machine communication; think about that the next time you twirl your iPhone around like an Etch-A-Sketch. Isn't removing the need for physical contact the next rational step? Chien tells us that, although there are many challenges yet to solve, the day of brain-controlled computing isn't so far off.

Dean Pomerleau works for Intel on matters of cognitive neuroscience, machine learning, computer vision, robotics, man-machine interfaces, brain processing of semantic information, and various brain-scanning technologies, such as fMRI, MEG, EEG and ECoG. He and his cohorts are solving the mechanisms of brain waves.

While there's no doubt the use cases are fascinating, Pomerleau also brushes off user concerns about implants, saying, "Eventually people may be willing to be more committed... to brain implants. Imagine being able to surf the Web with the power of your thoughts."

This is the precise line of thinking that Kirkpatrick debates so heatedly - perhaps as much now as he did in his editorial almost two years ago.

Have concerns around user privacy abated since then? Hardly, with Facebook and location-based-tech developers struggling to maintain balance for their users and constant struggles and inquisitions over corporate storage of user data. Has the issue of information overload lessened? If it had, would so many startups be staking their claim on the issue of firehose filtration? And is mobile tech obsolete enough to require even more portable access to the apps we love and - dare I say it? - need?

Are end users ready for brain implants? You tell us.
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Cloud Computing: Where to Next?

Alex Williams — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:04:00 -0800

In his keynote this morning, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff continued his critique on software companies for their lack of development and sense of entitlement. And not surprisingly, the full-on pitch continued for cloud computing with a parade of executives showing the applications they developed on Force.com.

About 19,000 people attended Dreamforce, the annual Salesforce.com event. Partners lined up to get on stage. David Girouard of Google showed a map with all their customers around the globe. He recounted a story with Eric Schmidt, who was astounded by the frustrations that CIO's expressed about the architecture they inherited. An Accenture executive said that cloud computing is here to stay. He showed the company's applications on Force.com. The Black Crowes performed last night. The pitch is fever high.

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What does this all say about the market? Is this an event that marks the point where cloud computing goes mainstream?

Have we reached the apex of cloud computing hype?

I asked the question on Twitter:

Gartner sees the hype this way:

Regardless, this has been a monumental week for cloud computing. The long established software companies have now lined up with their offering. Microsoft launched Azure. Salesforce.com unveiled Salesforce Chatter, Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2. IBM announced a cloud analytics platform that leverages Cognos, its business intelligence suite.

The more established companies carry the benefit of long established customer channels. IBM and Microsoft fit into this camp. Additionally, Microsoft appears to get it. The Azure platform integrates some open-source components. These companies face their own challenges as much internally as from the customer world. But their presence also means that cloud computing is close to being accepted in the enterprise mainstream.

Salesforce.com is a more interesting animal. Benioff is a very aggressive CEO. Business Week is calling him "The King of the Cloud." He is never shy to lampoon the established software companies in the market. He calls out his competitors like Sugar CRM, which is fighting right back with its own campaign: Behind The Smokescreen, a play on Benioff's new book: "Behind The Cloud."

Benioff has to show off his partners. He never misses an opportunity to tell you how many customers he has. In a way, he has to play this role. He has the big players running. He has to keep them running, on the defensive, so he can move in with Chatter across the enterprise. That's the trick right now for Benioff. Moving as fast as he possibly can to gain that permanent traction.

The hype is peaking. It's a different game for the entire market. It's a race now to win the mainstream.
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Yowza: A Video Interview with Heroes Actor Greg Grunberg

Dana Oshiro — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:50:00 -0800

When Heroes actor Greg Grunberg tells you to download an iPhone application, you can't help but listen. Best known as television's mind controlling savant Matt Parkman, Grunberg demoed location-based coupon startup Yowza at today's Under the Radar Mobility Conference. Grunberg's iPhone app offers users deals from nearby stores, restaurants and gyms. Now that Foursquare has begun advertising location-based deals it'll be interesting to see if there will be overlap between the two companies. ReadWriteWeb caught up with Grunberg to find out what's keeping him out of the actor's studio.

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Photo Credit: Albert L. Ortega
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