innovation

It's now over a month since Google released its open source web browser, Chrome. An interesting theory we heard recently is that Google will use Chrome to index the password protected Web - a.k.a. the 'dark web'.

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/security/Is_Google_Using_Chrome_to_Index_Password_Protected_Web';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';Right now the Chrome Terms of Service (TOS) prevents Google from indexing private data. But when you consider that Chrome was initially presented as a browser for applications, instead of just web pages, this theory begins to make more sense.

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Most web apps are password-protected and so there's no way for a normal search engine to index the data - even data that's generalized and doesn't identify individual users. But with a full-fledged browser to complement its search engine, Google now theoretically has the means to index this previously inaccessible data.

So is Google planning to use Chrome in the future to index password protected data on the Web? This needn't be a sinister question to ask, because the Web has evolved into something that is not easily indexed. Neil McAllister wrote a great article back in July entitled Is the Web still the Web? (via Slashdot), that delved into this subject. Neil wrote:

"Is it still the Web if it's not really hypertext? Is it still the Web if you can't navigate directly to specific content? Is it still the Web if the content can't be indexed and searched? Is it still the Web if you can only view the application on certain clients or devices? Is it still the Web if you can't view source?"

As he also pointed out, RIA Flash and Silverlight content can now be searched - see our own writeup of this in July.

So the next step is to be able to search and index web applications that rely on user-generated content. Chrome is the perfect vehicle to do that. There would have to be a change in the TOS to allow it, because indexing private data is of course still a no-no among search engines - especially the market leader Google. And there would be a big privacy issue with indexing your personal browsing history. But what if Google could convince users of the value of indexing web app data without identifying the individual user...

What do you think of this theory - too far out? Remember that Chrome has already become by most accounts the 4th leading browser, after IE, Firefox and Safari. It's already usurped Opera and it's only 1 month old, still in beta and there's no Mac version. In ReadWriteWeb's stats for September, Chrome was used by 6.3% of our readers - not bad when you consider we have a higher proportion of Mac users than mainstream sites.

When Chrome is 2nd or 3rd in the browser market, then it may be in a position to start implementing some grand plans - like indexing password protected data. Let us know if this is too crazy, or you can forsee a socially acceptable use case for this scenario.

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Sorry you're not seeing this cartoon earlier, but I had to update my Facebook status, upload and tag my Flickr photos from yesterday, answer three LinkedIn questions and stay on top of my Twitter feed.

There's something seductive about the social web, and the way it drives us to be always updating, always staying on top of our friends' updates, and always painfully aware that we could and should be doing more. I'd discuss more, but I need to go join a Seesmic chat...

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More Noise to Signal

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Often, on the back of a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign is a ‘Make Up My Room Now’ message of some sort. But, now matter how they phrase it, isn’t it the same as an “I’m Out, So This Would Be a Good to Rob Me, Especially If You Are Squeamish about Violence” sign?

Last night I went to the second performance of CodiceInternet, a one-person show by Marco Montemagno in Teatro dell’Arte in Milan. Granting that it was in Italian (which I do not speak) and that Marco is a friend, I still thought it was pretty great. (I understand a little Italian, and the context was familiar enoughthat I only had to turn to an Italian friend next to me a few times to roughly follow what was going on. Or so I have deluded myself. I am reminded of the old Woody Allen line: “I spead-read War and Peace in 30 minutes. It’s about Russia, right?”)

CodiceInternet (the Internet Code) is a project that’s been going on all month in Milan, including daily street interviews in the popular (and beautiful) Galleria. The events, the show, and the DVD that will come out of it are all intended to encourage Italians to accept the Internet in all its open glory. The percentage of Italians using the Internet is the lowest in Europe. Milan only has 100 hot spots. Net access is expensive and difficult. I’m writing this from a Net cafe, where the law requires all users to provide a passport or similar ID document to prevent terrorists from using the Net, because, as we all know, terrorists are too stupid to ever use codes.) According to Marco, the general view of the Internet in Italy is that it’s good for email or maybe looking something up, but othewise it’s a den of iniquity and a distraction from what matters. And that it is very hard to use.

So, Marco and the CodiceInternet group are trying to tell people that the Internet is not just a few tools in an ocean of porn. It is where people meet, connect, and build new things together. The Internet is for everyone. His stage show is entertaining, funny, and someetimes moving. (Marco is an incredibly engaging performer, as well as a Net entrepreneur and host of a Sky TV show about the Internet.)

CodiceInternet will continue, moving from city to city and building an online social network that already has 2,000 Italian bloggers on it. (Yesterday I got to hang out with a handful of those bloggers, which was great fun, of course.) The energy and goodwill of CoediceInternet is encouraging. Too bad it’s needed.

Do you remember what was happening one month ago in web technology? On September 1st the only story on most of our minds was the news of a Goolge browser, Chrome, which would be released the next day. Chrome was a big story last month, but it wasn't the only big news by a long shot.

Below we summarize and follow up on the 10 most-read stories on ReadWriteWeb in the month of September. These aren't necessarily the best stories, but they are the most popular. We hope you enjoy this little trip down short-term memory lane. Do these posts already feel like old news to you, our hyper savvy readers?

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10. Does Google Have Rights to Everything You Send Through Chrome?

Google released its own browser at the start of this month and at launch the software had some really egregious claims in the End User License Agreement. An anonymous commenter pointed out in our previous coverage of Chrome that Google claimed to have rights to all the information you send through their browser to reuse for promotional purposes! Google quickly backed down and removed the clause, though we questioned in a later post (It's Time for a New Terms of Service Regime) why such conditions were a part of the default "boilerplate" licenses for all Google services.

This post was discovered by readers from a wide variety of sources, including the Official Google Blog, which called us eagle eyed for catching the section of the license in question. In truth, it wasn't us that caught it, it was one of our anonymous readers, and we weren't the first blog to write about it either - we later noticed that Ina Fried at CNet found it first.

9. Five Ways to Use Social Media to Reach People Who Don't Use Social Media

I wrote this post myself, after giving a presentation to the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network where several people in the audience said that they were concerned their target constituencies weren't using social networks, microblogging and blogs. Could those technologies be useful anyway? We listed five techniques we've found to be effective.

More than 100 other blogs linked to this post in posts of their own, including particularly active conversations at Brazen Careerist (Social Media Is Difficult, Like Intimacy) and StreamXy (The Success System that Never Fails).

8. Top Digg User Zaibatsu Banned - Reactions from Both Zaibatsu and Digg Management

Digg cleaned house this month, closing the accounts of scores of people it accused of cheating the system. Founding editor Richard MacManus covered this story for RWW. One of those users kicked off the site was the popular user Reg Saddler, or Zaibatsu, the person with the 3rd most submissions to hit the front page of all time. Digg said the last straw was Zaibatsu's submission of a page that claimed to have lascivious pictures of a female Digg user on it and actually was a sales page for some product - both of which are violations of the Digg Terms of Service. Zaibatsu offered his own defense but in the end said in comments that he's since decided to "cash in" after all and do the types of things he's been wrongly accused of doing.

For an in depth look at the charming characters like Zaibatsu that make up and surround many top Digg users see our earlier post MrBabyMan: Digg Users Revolt, Against the One Pure Man at the Top. Our coverage of Zaibatsu's expulsion got a whole lot of readers from Digg.

7. Google to Offer its Own Browser: Chrome

On the first of September, we wrote about Google's new browser that would be released the next day. The company mailed out some fantastic comic book style explanations of their plans and we linked to a slide show of those books in my post. There were a lot of questions that came up that day: what about Google's relationship with Firefox? Would Chrome ever go mainstream? Would another browser make web development more difficult?

The idea behind Chrome was to build a browser that was mean for running applications, not just viewing web pages. We think that's a great idea and apparently a substantial percentage of our readers do as well. 6.5% of you visited ReadWriteWeb using Chrome in the first week it was available, in the past 3 weeks that number hasn't grown but it's only fell to 6.2%. We expect that percentage to grow substantially when a Mac version of Chrome is available.

6. Walmart Gives Consumers Number 1 Reason Why DRM is Not The Answer

This weekend Corvida wrote about Walmart's decision to shut down its DRM server and either eat or tie to a single computer the music it sold its own customers. The post was huge on Digg, where conversation was heated in comments. We put the comments people left on that story at Digg in a Wordle.net tag cloud below, just to give you a taste of what that community thought about the post and news.

5. Cartoon: Anything You Tweet Can and Will Be Used Against You

Rob Cottingham's weekly cartoon midmonth was very popular with readers - we'll let you click through for yourself to see it.

According to YackTrack, 30 people Twittered a link to the cartoon out to their circle of friends. Among that group was Spanish poet and political blogger Jaun de Bravo, who said "No todo es tuiteable." We didn't know that was the Spanish word for Twitter!

4. Podcaster Developer Uses Little-Known "Ad Hoc" Mode To Distribute Banned iPhone App

Sarah Perez dove into the mid-month debate about development on the iPhone platform with an in-depth post about a renegade app that used a back door to distribute an app outside the official App store. It was an app that let phone users listen to podcasts without subscribing to them in iTunes, which Apple wasn't very excited about.

The post was submitted to Digg by a Washington state high school student named Zak M. Zak's been on Digg for more than a year now and has had 40 submissions hit the front page. Almost 40% of his front page submissions have been in the past 2 weeks, since sending up Sarah's post on this iPhone app! All we're saying is that Zak's on fire and maybe his success with Sarah's awesome post has something to do with that. Only joking! We offer our most humble thanks to anyone who summarizes and submits our posts well to Digg.

Jason Ankeny at FierceDeveloper wrote just yesterday that Apple has now closed the loophole and the app that Sarah wrote about has been kicked off the platform. The developer, Alex Sokirynsky, says he's headed for Google's Android platform.

3. Rumor: EBay Trying to Sell StumbleUpon

In the middle of the month TechCrunch did the kind of investigative work that, let's face it, no one in the tech blogosphere does better. They unearthed efforts by eBay to sell off social discovery site StumbleUpon. Our own Frederic Lardinois wrote up the rumor and speculated, as did Silicon Alley Insider, that selling off Skype would be an even better idea.

Our post was a huge hit on StumbleUpon, as we presume most other posts were on this topic.

2. Top 10 Apps Worth Jailbreaking Your iPhone to Get

On the first weekend of the month, Corvida wrote a monster post arguing that there were iPhone apps outside of the thousands of approved ones that were so good they were worth nullifying your phone's warranty for.

Think the iPhone is just for Mac lovers? This was the 2nd most read story on ReadWriteWeb for the whole month and almost 80% of our site visitors use Windows. People love the iPhone, almost everyone does. (60% of the RWW writing staff, however, do not own an iPhone.)

And the #1 most-read story on RWW for the month of September was...

1. Serious Security Flaw in Google Chrome

On the day that Chrome came out, September 2nd, Frederic Lardinois wrote about a big security hole in the new Google browser. Tens of thousands of people wanted to know what it the security flaw was - perhaps for their protection and perhaps to gawk at the shortcomings in software from the otherwise triumphant Google.

To be honest, it seems in retrospect like an odd story to be the hottest story here for the whole month. That's the facts, though.

Ryan Narraine, a security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab, wrote the first report on the flaw at ZDNet but after a fairly extensive hunt we can't see any follow up from ZDNet or anyone else about whether the flaw has been fixed. A fair number of people argued that it wasn't even a flaw as it required a user to choose to run an executable. As Frederic pointed out in his point, the "flaw" depends on a lot of social engineering. Many commenters all around the web responded simply that it was too early to trust a brand new browser on its first day online.

Conclusion:

Last month was a big one for the web. As is often the case, the topics our readers came for the most were ones concerning control. That's one way to interpret them, at least. Could Chrome wrestle control over the browsing experience away from IE and Firefox? Could it put users more in control as a more appropriate tool to use in an era of applications, beyond web pages? DRM and the closed Apple iPhone store were the subject of multiple control control stories as well.

Some of our favorite posts from last month that didn't make the top 10 list but that we wish had include User Experience, Learning from the Pros, Sarah Perez's 3 part Scannable World series and Richard MacManus's write up of a report finding that 70% of businesses now allow social media use at work.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by ReadWriteWeb in the past month to read these stories. We appreciate your ongoing support and engagement in discussion.

Image credit on water photo above, Seventh Sense by Flickr user woodleywonderworks.

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In Amsterdam the social media technology conference PICNIC2008 wrapped up last week after devoting an entire day of scheduling to the innovations coming out of Africa. Dubbed 'Surprising Africa', the conference featured prolific social entrepreneurs and technology developers from around the world who offered insight into various projects from the African continent.

In this post we look at the state of the fast-growing mobile industry in Africa. This is the second post in our series on Africa's Web (Part 1 is here).

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Africa is unique in that it seems to have bypassed the same era of community infrastructure building that has occurred in developed nations around the world. This is not without reason, there are some incredible hurdles to over come. Displacing the poor, complying with local governments, paying bribes, and the risk of civil unrest. Thus, most of the technologies that currently permeate Africa aren't terrestrial. There are very few telephone lines, but mobile penetration is higher than any other region in the world. There is also limited terrestrial fiber for connecting to the internet. Instead, internet connectivity is distributed nearly entirely by satellite. As useful as this is now, satellite connections have a bottleneck that naturally limits the number of users who can connect before the whole network slows down. This keeps prices unreasonably high while internet speeds tend to be unreasonably slow in comparison to the rest of the world.

The tough conditions developers face in the continent provide some challenges but overcoming them offers something greater. According to Ushahidi co-founder Erik Hersman:

"The challenges brought about by bad governance, poverty, low bandwidth (all the negative things you associate with Africa) also provide an incredible opportunity. The developers who are coming up with solutions in the continent, the ones who are writing software or hacking hardware, are creating for some of the harshest environments and use-cases in the world. If it works in Africa, it will work anywhere."

Perhaps this thought is what motivated Google to invest in O3B Networks earlier this month. O3B Networks is an ambitious attempt to bring three billion people in the developing world (mainly in parts of Asia and Africa) online by launching sixteen inexpensive, low-orbit satellites. The potential benefits for Google are obvious. This is three billion new internet users, who will more than likely use Google to search, and who will potentially click-through Adsense links and use other Google products. An indicator that Google may be anticipating as much is their move into Africa last year. They've since opened offices and hired people in both South Africa and Kenya with plans to eventually operate out of all sub-Saharan African countries.

Mobile Penetration Statistics from Africa

• At the end of 2007 there were over 280 million mobile phone subscribers in Africa, representing a penetration rate of 30.4%
• Africa has become the fastest growing mobile market in the world with mobile penetration in the region ranging from 30% to 100% from country to country.
• Fastest growing markets are in Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt
• Increased competition as more operators come online in each country (11 in Nigeria, 4 in Kenya and SA, 3 in Egypt and Morocco)
• Pre-paid subscriptions account for nearly 95 percent of total mobile subscriptions in the region.
• The Democratic Republic of Congo, population 60 million, has 10,000 fixed telephones but more than a million mobile phone subscribers.
• In Chad, the fifth-least developed country, mobile phone usage jumped from 10,000 to 200,000 in three years.

via PICNIC2008

African Innovations in Mobile

A broad look at some of the tech being produced for the mobile industry by the continent...

Micro-payments and Mobile Banking

In Africa, until recently, there's been no easy way for consumers to purchase things other than with cash. Most financial institutions on the continent don't offer credit credit cards, and those that do have trouble finding other institutions that will accept them. This has lead to an incredible amount of innovation in the areas of micro-payments and mobile banking. MPESA by Safaricom (micro-payments) and Wizzit (mobile banking) are examples.

Mobile News Reporting

Because of the lack of basic infrastructure, getting information from one place to another quickly is often extremely difficult. A number of organizations have tackled this problem using Mobile devices. mPedigree offers a way to authenticate pharmaceutical drugs and prescriptions using SMS. Winafrique tackles issues with communication and power by offering wind powered cellular towers. QuestionBox.org collects data from and distributes it to rural areas using a SMS/web/voice platform. Ushahidi allows people to report and geolocate incidents of violence and incident using SMS.

Mobile Application Developers

Kenya's Mobile Planet made news in August when Google announced that they'd be investing in the mobile application start-up. Mobile Planet specializes in the development of wireless voice & data applications for mobile devices in Kenya, with a special focus on SMS-based products and services. Meanwhile, independent developers like Moris Mbetsa have repurposed mobile technology for all sorts of solutions like this anti-theft and tracking system for vehicles.

See also: Social Media in Africa, Part 1

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Thanks to all who sent in their stories of gritty entrepreneurs. To those who just copied the standard PR spiel with an opening line about "gritty entrepreneurs", please stop! digg_url = 'http://digg.com/business_finance/Where_Are_The_Profitable_VC_Funded_Web_2_0_Startups';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';We will be doing some interviews. Right now we are parsing through the incoming stories to classify and spot some trends.

The first big question that jumps out is: where are the profitable VC funded web ventures?

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Lots Of Bootstrappers Out There

We heard from lots of gritty entrepreneurs building business the old fashioned way, keeping costs low and funding from revenue. I have done that and know how hard it is to do, so here is a big cheer of recognition for all who are going that route. I hope we can profile some in the future.

When you make it to profitability via bootstrapping, you have a wonderful independence and freedom. You have to keep clients happy every day, but you really do get to call the shots. You don't have a money guy in the boardroom. This is why many people become entrepreneurs.

But what we want to focus on here are VC funded web 2.0 ventures that got to profitability as standalone ventures.

Surely Jigsaw is not the only one?!

We chose Jigsaw to kick off this series because they were VC funded and profitable. (Many people don't like Jigsaw, it seems like a tool for spammers, but that is another story and a bit out of date from what we can see). The point here is, what other Web 2.0 companies have been funded by VC and have reached profitability? Surely there must be some more? Did all the 2003/2004 era Series A funded ventures either exit or fail? Or are some on the cusp of profitability, with enough investor cash to get them there? Even with revenue forecasts that may need to be to brought down as a result of a slowing economy?

Please tell us about any VC funded web 2.0 ventures that are profitable today standalone. Here are the hurdles:

1. "VC Funded". A minimum $3m Series A from a recognized VC fund.
2. "Web 2.0 venture". We will be as loose as possible in this definition. In fact, any web venture funded after 2002 is OK as any venture after that date is likely to have some features of user generated content, social media, SaaS or other 2.0ish characteristics. "Web 2.0" is like the definition of art "I cannot define it, but I know it when I see it and I know what I like".
3. "Profitable". On this criteria we will be tight. We mean the Warren Buffet definition of profitable, which means "free cash flow", otherwise known as "owner earnings". It is really simple and you cannot fake it. You either get more cash from operations (cash from investors does NOT count) than you spend, or you don't. Accounting conventions like EBITDA don't count. More on this later.
4. "Today". That means this quarter. Even better last quarter. Or more than a few quarters.
5. "Standalone". Skype maybe profitable within EBay or YouTube within Google. That is a separate subject. We are looking for standalone ventures that have not exited. They made it to profitability on their own.

Why Free Cash Flow Is The Measure

EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest Taxation Depreciation and Amortization) is an accounting convention that is used a lot in the private equity business. "Private Equity" used to be known as "Leveraged Buyout". The L word is not in vogue today (Ed, using understatement as humor seldom works). Seriously, Private Equity deals have been based on their ability to raise debt at low cost. That game is over for a while.

EBITDA is supposed to be a measure of how much debt you can put on a company. It is usually applicable to well established businesses in traditional industries. Recently it has been used in relation to Facebook and other large web ventures. This is where it gets interesting for web entrepreneurs and their investors.

Is Facebook Profitable?

According to a report in BoomTown in January 2008, based on an interview with Mark Zuckerberg:

"Revenue for Facebook for 2007 will be $150 million, as has been widely reported. But for 2008, Zuckerberg projected revenue to be increased to $300 million to $350 million.

More interesting was the news that Facebook would spend $200 million next year on capital expenditures, which is a whole lot of servers.

By the way, more expenses, noted chatty Mark, those employee levels would rise to more than 1,000 in 2008 from 450 now.

And Zuckerberg also said the company's EBITDA-earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization and a number widely used by Wall Street as an indication of operating performance-would be $50 million in 2008.

That means the company would have a negative cash flow of about $150 million (EBITDA minus CapEx), rather than break even, as it does now."

Is Facebook profitable today, in the last quarter of 2008? Well it is almost certainly EBITDA positive, butthat is not the true measure. The answer is "maybe". If Facebook is hitting $300m to $350m this year (2008) and their operating costs have doubled from $50m to $100m (which is reasonable assumption as they said they would more than double employees from 450 to 1,000), they would have EBITDA of $200m to $250m. That sounds pretty good. But after $200m in Capex for servers, they are only breaking even on free cash flow at the bottom of their revenue forecast range. And, given the failure of Beacon and declining CPM rates on social networks, my guess (it is only a guess) is that Facebook revenues will be at the lower end of their forecast or even below.

But enough about Faceboom. The more generally interesting business issue highlighted by their story is that Capital Expenditure ("Capex") does matter for web ventures. In fact, it is a mission critical issue, with good software design at the heart of the issue.

Servers Are An Operating Expense For Web 2.0 Ventures

With user generated content, you don't pay people to create content that you use to generate advertising revenues. So your operating costs are R&D (developers), advertising sales and all those senior management overhead lumped into the General & Administrative (G&A) cost bucket. I don't really understand what 1,000 people do at Facebook, but that is another story.

As you scale, people costs should not scale. Servers do need to scale. That is where Facebook must be suffering from some sloppy early software design. That is fine, the initial win is all about user traction and a scalable design is secondary. But today it is a critical issue for Facebook. It is also a critical issue for any venture starting out today. Spending a few bucks early on to get a scalable architecture seems sensible. This is not rocket science, any competent software architect knows how to do this.

Should Servers Be Outsourced Or Leased?

Capex sounds old-fashioned. Why buy servers when you can lease or rent? If Facebook leased rather than bought servers, they could have positive free cash flow even at the lower end of their revenue forecast. The credit crisis will make leasing a bit tougher. Renting via Hardware As A Service (HaaS) is the ideal route for startups you benefit from the scale of the HaaS vendor. But it is unclear how the economics scale for the buyer? It is unclear whether Amazon AWS or any other HaaS is a serious option at Facebook's scale (or the scale of any VC funded venture that is nudging profitability).

Scale Or Profits - The New Choice?

It seems that ventures that can see a fairly quick way to profitability, simply ignore the VC route. The feeling seems to be mutual. VC look at a lot of the businesses that got to profitability and say "too small".

So, you have to choose either big and unprofitable or small and profitable? That does not make sense. If that is true, is this an issue with Web 2.0 models? Some VCs have seen this as a failure of IPO markets, meaning that public market investors won't trust unprofitable ventures promising they will be profitable in future. This "won't get fooled again" view is natural after the Web 1.0 bubble burst.

Trade sales for unprofitable ventures are unlikely to be the solution in the next few years. Not good trade sales at any rate (fire sales are technically trade sales, but they are not a good result). The buyer will be much less willing to fund losses because their investors will be less willing to fund losses for an uncertain period of time. If the venture is close to profitability it does not need to exit and nobody wants to exit in a down market unless they have to. VC have plenty of cash so this is not a financing issue, if the path to profitability is clear.

Maybe profitability for a lot of Web 2.0 ventures is really close? Maybe it just takes longer for Web 2.0 ventures to get to profitable - but that they will be fantastic cash cows when they get there?

Image: mlitty

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In March this year, Cisco launched the ASR 1000 Router Series. No big deal, but for the fact that it was delivered completely via social media. This was apparently Cisco's fifth most successful campaign, and according to the company it has proved to be a turning point for the way Cisco takes products to market: "virtually, virally, and visually."

The biggest lesson here is this: Routers aren't sexy. If Cisco can make a router exciting enough for social media, you too can utilize social media to create a buzz about your product or service.

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Social media is all about building an experience - not an event. LaSandra Brill, manager of Web and social media marketing at Cisco discussed the tactics and results of the ASR 1000 launch at the Social Media Marketing Summit this week. I've listed the steps taken by Cisco to reach its goals below; you can see Brill's presentation on SlideShare.

ASR 100 Launch Campaign Steps

1. Created a fun micro site directed at uber users (the tech and early adopter audience) to help create and spread buzz.
2. Cross posted videos from the micro site to YouTube to extend reach.
3. Established Second Life presence that included a countdown calculator and pre event live concert to increase visibility; research showed much of their audience is on Second Life.
4. Created a FaceBook group to cater to users not part of Second Life.
5. Created an interactive 3D game - Edge Quest - to attract the large gaming audience.
6. Created a widget that holds a collection of key videos, documents and images that allows sharing for their content, while remaining on their server.
7. Blogged about it on the Cisco blog to try and intrigue bloggers and customers.
8. Heightened buzz with press with a vague two paragraph teaser press release to extend press coverage and fuel buzz.
9. Created a social media release to reach out to bloggers.
10. Introduced product via live online event; video on Second Life that was cross posted on FaceBook and YouTube.
11. Created 'Ask the Expert' - a forum where customers could talk to the engineers that created the product.

Cisco says they met their goal of increasing visibility and involving their audience by using the social Web, creating buzz and building a community at a negligible cost; a soft cost that involved time, resources, and creativity instead of budget.

Given the state of the US economy right now, the social Web seems to be the smartest choice corporations (or individuals) can make if they want to create passion and excitement for their brand - at a soft cost.

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The Velveteen Rabbi points to Glenna Gordon’s post about celebrating the Jewish new year in Uganda.

[Tags: judaism uganda rosh_hashonah ]

It's time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. This week Nokia launched an iPhone competitor called the Tube, Netflix released an API, Google Blog Search re-designed, and we ran a poll about Flash coming to iPhone. On the trends side, we investigated the lack of commercial RDF apps in the Semantic Web, reviewed 5 insightful science books, launched our 'Gritty Entrepreneurs' series, and interviewed a co-founder of last.fm. We also brought you the latest from our new Enterprise Channel.

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Nokia Reveals iPhone Competitor And Goes to Battle With iTunes

At an analyst and media event in London this week, Nokia unveiled their company's first touch-screen phone, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, otherwise known as the Nokia "Tube," a device designed to compete directly with Apple's iPhone. Along with the phone, Nokia also detailed plans for their new "Comes With Music" service, a 12-month subscription service which offers unlimited downloads. There's no charge to download the individual tracks because the cost for the music is bundled into the cost of the phone.

Netflix API Launches - Here's What it Will and Won't Include

The much-awaited Application Programming Interface (API) for movie site Netflix launched this week. It looks pretty good, but there are some major limitations, too. Millions of people love movies via Netflix, making this API an opportunity for all kinds of developers to add well-known value to any other application.

See also: Evernote Hits a Homerun With API, Data Portability

Google Blogsearch Relaunches as Techmeme Killer, Across 11 Categories

In its first major upgrade ever, Google Blogsearch relaunched and looks radically different. Instead of the blank page look of Google.com, Blogsearch now looks like Google News (but uglier) - with the hottest topics from the blogosphere aggregated on the front page. Readers can drill down in 11 different categories, from technology, business, sports and entertainment. Google says you can use Blogsearch to see what the world is talking about.

RWW Predictions: Will eBay Sell StumbleUpon?

Last week rumors were swirling that eBay was looking to sell StumbleUpon. eBay purchased StumbleUpon in early 2007 for a bargain price of $75 million. We've still yet to have these rumors confirmed, but what if eBay were to actually sell StumbleUpon? We ran a prediction challenge this week asking whether eBay will sell the service by the end of this year and if so, the price tag that it might fetch. Here are the results:

PD_WIDGET.keyword="auctionid:6065";PD_WIDGET.height="250";PD_WIDGET.width="300";PD_WIDGET.color1="0xFFFFFF";PD_WIDGET.color2="0xB80103";PD_WIDGET.color3="0xB80103";PD_WIDGET.create();

Poll: Adobe Confirms Flash For iPhone - Do You Care?

At the Flash on the Beach 08 conference being held in Brighton, England, Adobe's Senior Director of Engineering, Paul Betlem, confirmed that a Flash Player is in development for the iPhone. The information was provided in answer to a direct question from an audience member during the Town Hall meeting sessions held during the conference. Also check out our poll on the topic:

Does iPhone's Lack of Flash Bother You?
( surveys)

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

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Web Trends

Where Are All The RDF-based Semantic Web Apps?

RDF is the cornerstone of The Semantic Web, yet there still very few commercial RDF apps.

In the latest issue of Nodalities, a magazine about the Semantic Web by UK company Talis, there is an article by Talis CTO Ian Davis about the state of Semantic Web applications. Davis says that we're still in "Generation Zero" of the Semantic Web, because there are relatively few compelling apps. Specifically he notes that "there are still only a handful of applications that incorporate RDF at their heart and none of these are using the full potential of the Semantic Web." RDF is the Semantic Web's equivalent of the Web's HTML - its chief characteristic is the ability to ascribe meaning to data. We investigate...

See also: Swirrl: Newly Launched Semantic Web Wiki

Web 2.0 Gritty Entrepreneurs

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Times are now tougher. Which makes most people head home. The half-hearted entrepreneurs, the wannabes who thought it was going to be easy, the folks with connections to VCs who could get a $5m Series A for a copycat app. Who will be left? The gritty entrepreneur of the old school who knows that it is really, really tough to build a great company. At ReadWriteWeb we celebrate these gritty entrepreneurs and in a series that kicked off this week we will be writing about them - and for them.

See also: Gritty Entrepreneurs: Jigsaw, a Profitable Web 2.0 Venture

Interview With Last.fm Founder Richard Jones

This week we interviewed one of the founders of online music service last.fm, Richard "Mr Scrobble" Jones. We wanted to find out last.fm's reaction to the launch of MySpace Music and the rise of Imeem, discuss business models in online music, and find out what's new at last.fm. We ran the interview in 3 parts, over 3 days. Part 1 discusses the increasing competition in online music this year. See also Part 2, on business models and Part 3, on design and features.

5 Great Science Books to Expand Your Mind

From the dynamics of social networks to market bubbles, science has a lot to say about the world of technology.

One of the great discoveries of modern science was the realization of how interconnected the world is. The deterministic, Newtonian view of a clockwork Universe was replaced by the much more dynamic, uncertain and entangled world of Quantum Mechanics. The new world is the one where Godel forever cut hopes for completeness in mathematics and Turing showed that computation, like the future, is fundamentally unpredictable. Despite these unexpected setbacks, modern science is wonderful, powerful and thought provoking - and relevant to technologists.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

RWW Enterprise Channel

Mumboe Uses Semantics To Pull Key Data From Contracts

Mumboe isn't just another enterprise collaboration suite. Instead, they focus on doing one thing and doing it well: making business agreements searchable. That's a very unique need they fill, which is why is why they already have 3000 customers using their free Express solution after only having launched earlier this spring.

To compete with the handful of other vendors in this narrow space, Mumboe has now added a new feature called On-Demand Contract Intelligence, which takes advantage of the service's semantic processing engine to deliver something the others don't: automatic extraction of data.

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.

Discuss

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Strands has created a social recommender engine that is able to provide real-time recommendations of products and services through computers, mobile phones and other Internet-connected devices.

Calais, powered by Thomson Reuters, brings state-of-the-art semantic functionality into your blog, content management system, site or application.

The Web 3.0 Conference is for the builders of the next generation Web: designers, developers, entrepreneurs, marketers, business strategists, and venture capitalists. It's on October 16 - 17, 2008 in Santa Clara, CA.

Direct Media Exchange is a simple solution for managing ad networks that allows publishers to make more money from their websites.

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Eurekster is developer of the swicki that we use on RWW, a custom social search portal on the topic of your choice (in our case web tech).

MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW and SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

Discuss

GooseGrade lets readers of a blog highlight mistakes of the copy-edit sort so that the blogger can fix them. It stops spammers by grading each copy-editor based on whether her suggested changes are accepted by the blogger. Here’s a C-NET article about it.

I’d try it at this blog, because I do occasionally (= constantly) make mistakes, but I’m on the road and can’t easily update my template…

[Tags: goosegrade copyedit crowdsourcing everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Semantic Web entrepreneur David Provost has published a report about the state of business in the Semantic Web and it's a good read for anyone interested in the sector. It's titled On the Cusp: A Global Review of the Semantic Web Industry. We also mentioned it in our post Where Are All The RDF-based Semantic Web Apps?.

The Semantic Web is a collection of technologies that makes the meaning of content online understandable by machines. After surveying 17 Semantic Web companies, Provost concludes that Semantic science is being productized, differentiated, invested in by mainstream players and increasingly sought after in the business world.

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Provost aims to use real-world examples to articulate the value proposition of the Semantic Web in accessible, non-technical language. That there are enough examples available for him to do this is great. His conclusions don't always seem as well supported by his evidence as he'd like - but the profiles he writes of 17 Semantic Web companies are very interesting to read.

What are these companies doing? Provost writes:
"..some companies are beginning to focus on specific uses of Semantic technology to create solutions in areas like knowledge management, risk management, content management and more. This is a key development in the Semantic Web industry because until fairly recently, most vendors simply sold development tools."

The report surveys companies ranging from the innovative but unlaunched Anzo for Excel from Cambridge Semantics, to well-known big players like Down Jones Client Solutions and RWW sponsor Reuters Calais Initiative, to relatively unknown big players like the already very commercialized Expert System. 10 of the companies were from the US, 6 from Europe and 1 from South Korea.

Above: Chart from Provost's report.

We've been wanting to learn more about "under the radar" but commercialized semantic web companies ever since doing a briefing with Expert System a few months ago. We had never heard of the Italian company before, but they believe they already have they have a richer, deeper semantic index than anyone else online. They told us their database at the time contained 350k English words and 2.8m relationships between them. including geographic representations. They power Microsoft's spell checker and the Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the Blackberry. They also sell NLP software to the US military and Department of Homeland Security, which didn't seem like anything to brag about to us but presumably makes up a significant part of the $12 million+ in revenue they told Provost they made last year.

And some people say the Semantic Web only exists inside the laboratories of Web 3.0 eggheads!

Shortcomings of the Report

Provost writes that "the vendors [in] this report have all the appearances of thriving, emerging technology companies and they have shown their readiness to cross borders, continents, and oceans to reach customers." You'd think they turned water into wine. Those are strong words for a study in which only 4 of 17 companies were willing to report their revenue and several hadn't launched products yet.

The logic here is sometimes pretty amazing.
The above examples [there were two discussed - RWW] are just a brief sampling of the commercial success that the Semantic Web has been experiencing. In broad terms, it's easy to point out the longevity of many companies in this industry and use that as a proxy for commercial success [wow - RWW]. With more time (and space in this report), additional examples could be described but the most interesting prospect pertains to what the industry landscape will look like in twelve months. [hmmm...-RWW]

In fact, while Provost has glowingly positive things to about all the companies he surveyed, the absence of engagement with any of their shortcomings makes the report read more like marketing material than any objective take on what's supposed to be world-changing technology.

This is a Fun Read

The fact is, though, that Provost writes a great introduction to many companies working to sell software in a field still too widely believed to be ephemeral. The stories of each of the 17 companies profiled are fun to read and many of Provost's points of analysis are both intuitive and thought provoking.

He says the sector is "on the cusp" of major penetration into existing markets currently served by non-semantic software. Provost argues that the Semantic Web struggles to explain itself because the World Wide Web is so intensely visual and semantics are not. He says that reselling business partners in specific distribution channels are combining their domain knowledge with the science of the software developers to bring these tools to market. He tells a great, if unattributed, story about what Linked Data could mean to the banking industry.

We hadn't heard of several of the companies profiled in the report, and a handful of them had never been mentioned by the 34 semantic web specialist blogs we track, either.

There's something here for everyone. You can read the full report here.

Discuss

We watch in disbelief as financial markets retreat and the investment banking industry morphs into something yet to be determined. We are witnessing the dark side of financial leverage. While “de-leveraging” has become the buzzword du jour, we may miss the real lessons of the current crisis and the real opportunities for leverage.

The lure and risks of financial leverage

Financial leverage is a powerful accelerant in growing markets.  Companies can extend their reach far more rapidly by borrowing other people’s money.  They can also generate much higher returns for the equity investors if companies have opportunities for profitable growth. This is especially true when companies operate in an environment with relatively low interest rates and significant growth in global liquidity, as we have had over the past decade or so.

At every level of our society - individual, firm and government - financial leverage has proven very seductive.  To given an idea of how seductive , the total amount of credit market debt in the U.S. in 1980 was about the same as our GDP but, by 2007, it had increased to 350% of GDP.

But, as we are learning, financial leverage has a significant downside as well. If the “real” economy turns down or the company fails to appropriately assess the risks with its growth strategy, financial leverage quickly becomes an albatross.  The company is stuck with fixed interest payments that have to be covered every quarter.  If the value of the assets being financed also deteriorates the company gets a double whammy when it comes time to refinance.  And if liquidity dries up, the company is vulnerable to a triple whammy.

Financial leverage is challenging enough at an individual company level. It becomes even more challenging in our highly connected global economy, as our current crisis illustrates.  When many companies are highly leveraged, if one company runs into financial trouble, it can generate a domino effect as each company struggles to cover its debt obligations and puts pressure on the companies that have borrowed from it. This is the scramble to “de-leverage” that we are now witnessing.  Cash is king and leverage, once worshipped as a god, now becomes the devil.

One option - capability leverage

But, as we begin to see the very real downsides of financial leverage, we might want to explore other forms of leverage that are far more robust in times of economic downturn. For example, capability leverage—the ability to access and mobilize the resources of other companies to add more value to customers—is a powerful force for creating value in markets. Rather than one company trying to do everything, it can mobilize a broader network of participants to deliver highly specialized and flexibly tailored value to individual customers.

This approach frees up each company to focus its own resources on what it does best while accessing the world-class capability of other companies in the network. Rather than relying on a few select business partners, companies can now employ innovative new management techniques to create and coordinate networks of thousands of business partners that provide far more leverage than ever possible before.  I explored this opportunity in an article on Leveraged Growth in Harvard Business Review.

Financial leverage is insidious because, unless carefully monitored, it can undermine incentives to pursue capability leverage.  If a company has ready access to cash through various forms of debt, it is much more likely to feel that it can support a much broader range of business initiatives than if cash is tight.  As a result, it is much easier to support a “not invented here” culture and attempt to do everything oneself.  It is no accident that some of the most sophisticated examples of capability leverage have emerged among entrepreneurial companies in Asia that did not have access to financial capital.

Another option - learning leverage

Yet there’s an even more powerful form of leverage for companies to tap into: learning leverage.  Learning leverage seeks to build relationships with other companies that help each company get better faster by working with others. Rather than treating existing resources as fixed, learning leverage recognizes the value for everyone in finding ways to continually push the performance envelope for all participants.  In rapidly changing global markets, learning leverage provides a powerful approach to increase value delivered to customers. Learning leverage introduces a powerful compounding effect – not only does the value delivered increase with the number and diversity of participants, but more value is created by each participant over time.

Comparing the three forms of leverage

Here’s one way to look at the three forms of leverage.  Financial leverage magnifies returns, but does not increase the value delivered to the marketplace.  Capability leverage increases the value delivered by flexibly connecting resources that otherwise might not be accessible to customers or that might require great effort by customers to assemble on their own.  Learning leverage adds even more value by enabling individual participants to deliver higher levels of performance to the marketplace as they learn more rapidly from each other.

Capability leverage and learning leverage amplify value in times of economic prosperity, but they are even more valuable in times of margin pressure.  Rather than requiring one company to bear the brunt of this margin pressure, these forms of leverage make it easier for the company to focus on investments that can enhance differentiation while relying on others to deliver complementary value to the customer. In contrast to financial leverage, these forms of leverage alleviate and diffuse pressure during economic downturns, rather than magnifying pressure on the leveraged company. 

With some notable exceptions in arenas like high tech and biotech, most Western companies are still just scratching the surface of the potential for capability leverage and learning leverage.  Perhaps during this challenging economic time companies will have much greater incentive to explore these alternative forms of leverage. They may find that capability and learning leverage trump financial leverage.

What could possibly be bigger news than the supposed heart attack suffered by Apple CEO Steve Jobs? The fact that it's simply not true. The rumor which spread like wildfire across the internet this morning was based on a report from CNN's citizen journalism site, iReport.

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/apple/Steve_Jobs_Had_No_Heart_Attack_Journalism_Just_Failed';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';According to citizen reporter, Johntw: "Steve Jobs was rushed to the ER just a few hours ago after suffering a major heart attack." Apple quickly squashed the story, claiming it to be untrue. Did citizen journalism just fail us? You bet it did.

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The "Story"

The report about Steve Jobs appeared on CNN's citizen journalism site, iReport this morning. It read as follows:

Steve Jobs was rushed to the ER just a few hours ago after suffering a major heart attack. I have an insider who tells me that paramedics were called after Steve claimed to be suffering from severe chest pains and shortness of breath. My source has opted to remain anonymous, but he is quite reliable. I haven't seen anything about this anywhere else yet, and as of right now, I have no further information, so I thought this would be a good place to start. If anyone else has more information, please share it.

Silicon Alley Insider then proceeded to follow up, making phone calls to Apple. They were able to reach Katie Cotton, Vice President of Worldwide Communications, who replied saying "It is not true."

This Is Trouble

The question was then raised: do false reports like this damage CNN's credibility? The answer is yes, absolutely. This particular report may even lead to an SEC investigation where CNN will be asked to provide an IP address for the user who posted the story.

The problem here stems from the fact that because CNN has obviously decided not to police or edit the iReport section of their web site, the section is left wide open to "reporters" who want to wreak a little havoc.

But who are these citizen journalists? And how easy is it to become one?

Apparently, it's as easy to become a citizen journalist on CNN as it is to sign up for a new web app from an internet startup, if not easier. The process involves nothing more than filling out a name, screen name, and email address. Adding a phone number is optional and only necessary if you want the story to be considered by CNN. There's a CAPTCHA to prevent bots and an email confirmation link, but thanks to disposable email addresses, those are practically a waste of time these days.

Above: The Registration Form - Congratulations, You're A Journalist!

While most citizen journalists take their responsibility seriously as reporters of actual news, it's apparent that with iReport, just as with any web site on the internet today, there is going to be someone who decides to have a little sick "fun" with it. Who is the reporter by the name of Johntw anyway? As far as we could tell, the only way to get in touch with the reporter is through iReport's built-in messaging system. We sent him an email asking him why he reported this story, but it remains unanswered. In our minds, we're already imagining an adolescent kid who's having a good laugh with their friends this morning over how they just "punked" CNN.

We're interested in seeing how will CNN respond to this muddying of their good name. Will they disassociate themselves a bit from iReport? Or will they just be happy for the pageviews it brought? And will this give pause to other news outlets thinking of launching citizen journalism sites of their own? It's very possible. In these tough economic times, news reports that affect how the markets move are taken very seriously. Had the timing of this report been different, Apple stock could have really suffered. Fortunately, the rebuttal today came out fast enough that it shouldn't have any long-term effects. Next time, we may not be so lucky.

Discuss

This week we interviewed one of the founders of online music service last.fm, Richard "Mr Scrobble" Jones. We're running the interview in 3 parts, over 3 days. This is Part 3 about design and features; following on from Part 1 about last.fm and its competition and Part 2 about business models.

In this post we explore last.fm's feature set, how it compares to MySpace Music, and what we can expect to see from last.fm in the near future. Richard Jones also discusses how last.fm has managed to avoid the legal difficulties that have plagued Pandora.

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RWW: One of the enduring features of last.fm has been its mashups, based on your awesome Audioscrobbler database. RJ, what are a couple of your favorite recent last.fm mashups that you've seen (external apps or internal)?

RJ: Well, we liked the Last.fm/YouTube mashup Tim Bormans made so much that we hired him! Internally we've been working on multi-tag search which is available at our Playground, which allows you to search for music using multiple genres (folk + rock + gabba, etc); also on Playground we've been tweaking our Musical Soulmates app, which you could possibly consider the prototype for a future Last.fm dating service ;)

And of course, scrobbling continues to be an almost default setting for new music services now - from Hype Machine to Muxtape (RIP) to Blip.fm to the new version of VLC (which has 4 million downloads already since launch a couple of weeks ago), it seems like everything has to integrate scrobbling now. Great for us obviously, and great for our recommendations which will continue to improve as more people scrobble. People are scrobbling at a rate of 800 million times a month currently.

RWW: In terms of features, Pandora is similar to last.fm, in that both services have great recommendations and allow the user to discover new music. Both are streaming music services, yet it just seems to be Pandora - of all the 4 major services we've discussed so far - that has been having legislation issues. Can you clarify for our readers how last.fm has managed to avoid those sticky issues, when Pandora hasn't? I think many people are confused about that.

Last.fm is about more than just online radio. We've got millions of tracks available free-on-demand as well, and beyond that there's a massive social network element to the site. We also offer videos, the biggest events listings on the web (personalised to your taste), and our own audio and video content under the Last.fm/Presents banner. So the point is, online radio is only one of the things we do, so the legislation affects us only in one particular area of the Last.fm experience. As online radio is pretty much the single focus for Pandora, it understandably hits them harder.

The wider issue here, of course, is that royalty rates are high, and the debate around this needs to continue so we can reach a mutually beneficial and economically workable resolution. We don't want to see legitimate online broadcasters stifled by this - it's not good for music fans, artists or the wider music industry.

RWW: Lastly, one of the most interesting aspects of online music is its ability for new artists to be discovered. It's something MySpace has done well in the past, but we get the sense the perfect solution hasn't been found yet. As our own Marshall Kirkpatrick asked recently:

"How about a service that scans my iTunes library and my online listening history, determines my genres of interest and then never plays music from artists I've already listened to. Or makes sure to play some that I haven't."

Does last.fm have a feature like that coming up? ;-)

RJ: Do you think Myspace has done this well in the past? As you can tell from my reply to your first question [see Part 1], I would argue that Myspace has been a rather difficult site to navigate unless you're after popular stuff - and it's possibly going to be more of the same on Myspace Music, as the major labels jostle for frontpage real estate and push more indie/obscure music off the page.

Our recommendation system is being constantly refined to give music fans the best music discovery service on the web. I think we've got that covered. What's equally important is that these artists being discovered, if they're Long Tail or DIY, get the same kind of licensing and royalty breaks that more established artists get, which is why our Artist Royalty Program exists.

We've been doing this for 6 years, as I said, which is why it's kind of funny to be talking about this now because of Myspace Music. They're just catching up to free-on-demand after we pioneered the model almost a year ago. Now they've got to figure out how to make it easy to discover music that suits your taste (sharing playlists is one thing, but how do you find that music to share in the first place?), which we've been doing since 2002. After that, maybe they'll start paying unsigned artists. I would hope all this will come to Myspace Music at some point in the future - but it's happening on Last.fm now.

See also: Interview With Last.fm Founder Richard Jones: Part 1, The Competition and Part 2, Business Models

Discuss

When Microsoft announced the launch of its Live Search Cashback rebate program, it quickly became the laughingstock of the tech blogosphere and this week's launch of Live SearchPerks definitely did not help. However, according to the latest data from Hitwise, Microsoft's Cashback promotion is actually working and is helping live.com to keep its search traffic stable, even as Google's market share is rising.

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Live Search Cashback works by giving users a certain amount of money back every time they search for an item on live.com and then buy it from a participating store.

In July, Live Search Cashback represented 3.75% of traffic to live.com, but by September 27, that number had grown to 6.29%. According to Hitwise, visitors to the Cashback site were more likely to be female (55% vs. 45%) and half were between 25 and 45 years old with an average income of under $100,000.

Sign of the Times?

As Hitwise also points out, part of this interest in the Cashback program might have to do with the current economic crisis in the U.S., where shoppers are more likely to start looking for bargains and cash back programs.

Discuss

CERN today officially unveiled the massive computer network that will crunch the enormous amount of data coming from CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). CERN expects that the LHC will produce around 15 petabytes of data every year. While the LHC was in its planning stages, CERN's IT department decided that the only realistic way to handle this amount of data would be by relying on the then still novel idea of grid computing. CERN's grid consists of 100,000 processors at 140 scientific institutions in 33 countries.

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How to Crunch 15 Petabytes of Data?

As Science reported last month (subscription required), CERN's IT department quickly realized that no known data center could handle the amount of information the LHC would create. It was not even clear that Geneva's power grid could supply the energy necessary to run this massive data center. In addition, most of the money for the LHC project was going toward the collider itself, so that very little funding was left for the actual computing resources.

In order to distribute this data, CERN relies on dedicated 10Gbit/s fiber-optic lines that connect CERN with the 11 Tier-1 data centers on the grid. The Tier-1 data centers (pdf) will do some processing, but will also function as the main archives for the LHC data. These Tier-1 centers then farm out a large part of the actual data crunching to the Tier-2 data centers spread around the world. The Tier-2 centers are connected to the grid via regular, public Internet connections.

Large Hadron Collider @ Home

While grid computing has been around for quite a while now and has been implemented successfully on the public Internet by projects like SETI@home or Folding@home, CERN's grid is most likely the largest and most powerful grid established for scientific research so far.

CERN has also set up a project similar to Folding@home called (somewhat unimaginatively) LHC@home, which, thanks to the current shut-down of the LHC does not have much to do right now, but will allow individuals to contribute to CERN's efforts by donating computing time on their own computers.

Image of CERN Computer Center used courtesy of CERN.

Discuss

Earlier this week, parody musician Weird Al Yankovic announced that he would start releasing songs on iTunes right after he finishes them, bypassing the standard album model for a faster and more flexible approach. It looks like Yankovic made a deal with Apple, as iTunes will have exclusive rights to these new songs for the first two weeks. The first of these new songs will be available on October 7. Kid Rock, on the other hand, will now allow Rhapsody to carry his music, but does not allow a la carte downloading of his songs.

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As consumers have started to bypass the traditional album model in favor of just buying single songs anyway, releasing songs as they are done would make sense for many musicians. Weird Al, of course, tends to write very topical and time-sensitive material, which makes his case a bit different, but the model could work for other musicians as well.

Kid Rock

Kid Rock, ono of the last hold-outs with regards to digital music distribution (and especially iTunes), has signed an exclusive deal with music service Rhapsody to distribute his albums. In contrast to Weird Al, however, Kid Rock insists that consumers can only download full albums and not just choose specific songs.

Are Both Missing the Point?

In some ways, it seems both musicians are missing the point of digital distribution. Weird Al does an exclusive deal with iTunes, even though he has a big enough name to either give his songs away for free or to sell them himself, and Kid Rock is trying to go against his own fans' wishes by not allowing a la carte downloading. Then, of course, diamond-studded swimming pools don't grow on trees either...

Discuss

Recent legislative drama highlights the absurdity of expecting people to make sense of complex texts that are evolving rapidly in high-stakes, high-pressure situations. What we have here is a classic culture clash, in this case between people who think in terms of paper documents and those who think in terms of electronic documents.

Washington is a paper-based culture. There are hopeful signs of change, and Bob Glushko spotted one of them here:

Based on the file name embedded in the pdf of the bill — O:\AYO\AYO08C04.xml — at least the people doing the publishing work for the bill are doing their best to save our tax dollars by creating the file using XML for efficient production and revision.

But there’s no public access to AYO08C04.xml. The government’s reflex is still to publish paper, or its electronic equivalent, PDF. So when the Sunlight Foundation’s John Wonderlich tried to visualize the evolution of the Senate’s version of the bailout bill, he was reduced to printing out PDFs, arranging them on the floor, and marking them up with a yellow highlighter.

Recognizing the futility of this approach, he complained on a mailing list and Joshua Tauberer responded with a special GovTrack.us feature that extracts the text from the PDFs and provides electronic comparisons. John Wonderlich observes:

Josh’s page does what I failed to effectively do with paper: get a comprehensive view of what has changed between each copy of the bill.

As I noted with respect to my recent legislative excursion, every Wikipedia author/editor takes for granted the ability to review the entire history of an article, compare differences between any two versions easily and effectively, and collaborate with other interested parties.

Even more powerful change visualization is possible, as we saw when Andy Baio, in response to my LazyWeb request for animation of Wikipedia change history, sponsored a contest that Dan Phiffer won.

Is MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia, a more capable content management system than the one used by Congress to produce and collaboratively edit AYO08C04.xml? I would hope that the internal taxpayer-funded system is actually delivering the benefits that Bob Glushko supposes it must be. But how can we be sure? Maybe somebody in the know can comment.