The team behind microblogging service Pownce announced on the company blog today that it is joining blog software company SixApart and closing Pownce in two weeks. Pownce left private beta with a big launch just 11 months ago but the service never grew beyond a core group of fans.

The Pownce team says it plans to "come back with something much better in 2009." We're excited to see what Pownce co-founders Leah Culver and Mike Malone do at SixApart; it should be a very good environment for them to innovate in.

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This is the second move where well known innovators have taken their technology and brains to a bigger company and shuttered their startup that we've reported on in a week. Last week open source star Rael Dornfest sold his personal assistant startup Sandy to Twitter.

Though these startups were inspiring, we also think it quite noteworthy that even at a down time economically there are still jobs for super smart people. We covered the Pownce/SixApart deal in greater depth at our hire-tracking site Jobwire. See that coverage for more details about the technology that Pownce will bring to SixApart.

Yahoo just announced the top 10 search terms on its mobile search engine. The top mobile searches are either for social networks (MySpace, Facebook), or searches for local information (Craigslist, movies, weather). A lot of of mobile searchers were also looking for auctions on eBay. The top 10 is rounded out by searches for more time sensitive topics like the Olympics, AIG, and The Dark Knight. The only celebrity to appear in Yahoo's top 10 mobile searches is Kim Kardashian.

Interestingly, not a single one of the top mobile search terms appears on Yahoo's top 10 list of searches on its regular search engine.

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Here are both top 10 lists in order:

	Mobile Searches	Regular Searches
1	MySpace	Britney Spears
2	Facebook	WWE
3	Craigslist	Barack Obama
4	Movies	Miley Cyrus
5	Weather	RuneScape
6	Olympics	Jessica Alba
7	The Dark Knight	Naruto
8	Kim Kardashian	Lindsay Lohan
9	eBay	Angeline Jolie
10	AIG	American Idol

There are no real surprises here, but these results definitely stress the difference between what mobile users are looking for when they do searches compared to regular Internet users.

Getting to relevant information quickly is definitely the most important aspect of mobile search for mobile Internet users, who don't seem to be very interested in browsing the web for the sake of it. Hence, mobile users are obviously more interested in local and timely information like movie showtimes and weather than female celebrities. Social networks, which give users a quick dose of updates from friends, also fit in well with this style of Internet use.

Mobile users also seem to rely on search as a substitute for bookmarks more than regular Internet users.

Strangely, none of the top mobile search terms were related to the recent U.S. elections.

Last week Barack Obama's Presidential transition website Change.gov added OpenID login for commenters and now the entire site has been put under a Creative Commons license. These concepts are no longer just the dreams of "crack-pot fringe case" advocates - they're the official policy of the US President Elect.

The particular Creative Commons license chosen by Change.gov, the "By" license (one of many options), means that instead of the default US Copyright of "all rights reserved," visitors are now allowed to reuse any of the content from the site as long as they give attribution back to the original source. Standard Copyright is for protecting scarce content but Creative Commons is a legal framework set up to make sharing and reuse as easy as possible.

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We frequently post Creative Commons licensed photos in posts on this blog, for example. The CC "By" section on photo sharing site Flickr is filled with images that can be used commercialy and in derivative works, just as long as attribution is given to the original photo publisher. Travel social network Dopplr recently began using images from this same section of Flickr to create beautiful city profile pages on their site. Creative Commons recently created a new case study collection to demonstrate in detail how the various CC licenses have served publishers around the world.

The license on Change.gov also states that anyone who posts anything to Change.gov (like comments) must accept that their content will be under Creative Commons as well. This could be the first introduction to the CC concept for millions of people. It would have been good to see the CC license listed on the bottom of every page instead of just on a relatively obscure "copyright policy" page. In all likelihood though, the Obama team chose CC because it makes the most sense to use, not to prove a point.

This act of support for progressive intellectual property policy is big news, but it also makes us wonder - what's next? That's exciting to think about.

Check out CreativeCommons.org to learn more about this new publishing paradigm.

According to the Dallas Morning News, Blockbuster, the beleaguered video rental chain, is planning to use Microsoft's Live Mesh platform to deliver streaming video to desktops and mobile devices. The article is weak on specifics, but Blockbuster seems to be planning to use Live Mesh specifically to allow users to start watching a movie on one TV and then to continue the movie on another TV or mobile device later on. Bockbuster's CIO Keith Morrow also mentioned a parental notification system that would alert parents if a child tried to watch a movie during homework time.

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It is not quite clear why Blockbuster chose Live Mesh to provide this functionality instead of developing its own software (indeed, the author of the article doesn't seem to be quite sure what Live Mesh is in the first place). Based on the available information, it would seem that Blockbuster is mostly interested in the synchronization features that make up the core of the current Live Mesh experience. It is also not clear if Blockbuster plans to utilize other aspects of Microsoft's Azure platform.

Judging from the tentative language used by Keith Morrow, it is hard to pinpoint when (or even if) Blockbuster will release any consumer products based on Live Mesh. However, Live Mesh is clearly on the radar of a lot of corporate IT departments and hopefully we will see some 'real' products very soon.

Songbeat is an interesting new desktop music application that lets you stream and download songs from SeeqPod, Project Playlist, Spool.fm, and iASK. Songbeat also gives you the option to 'record' music from your last.fm stations. To do this, the application records the live stream, which, according to Songbeat is perfectly legal in Germany, where the company is headquartered.

The free version of Songbeat allows you to download up to 25 songs for free, but in order to download an unlimited number of songs, users will have to pay $29.99.

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As of now, Songbeat is only available for Vista and XP. Songbeat is planning to release Mac and iPhone versions next year.

Of course, there are already numerous application (online and offline) that allow users to search and play songs from various free music services. Some of the features that make Songbeat stand out are the ability to quickly import your downloaded songs to iTunes, Winamp, or the Windows Media Player, as well as its large directory of mixtapes. Songbeat also automatically downloads lyrics and album art with every song.

Besides selling the full version of Songbeat, the company hopes to make money through the 'Songbeat Discover' service, which allows users to legally buy songs from Amazon's music store and concert tickets from Ticketmaster.

There are some obvious legal questions about the service. Songbeat's founders Philip Eggersgluess and Marco Rydmann argue that Songbeat only creates a model for monetizing music that is already freely available online. However, it remains to be seen if the RIAA will agree with this line of reasoning.

It seems we're approaching a new age here on the Internet. Instead being anonymous, faceless IP addresses, social computing and changing technologies have allowed the lines between the "real" world and the "virtual" world to blur. Web 2.0 helped create a world where your identity is revealed in bits and pieces as you share snippets of your life online - a photo here, a Stumble there, a tweet, a Digg, etc. However, the rise of social media is only one of the changes that is busy shaping the new web.

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On tomorrow's web, we're no longer going to be anonymous. In fact, one can argue that we're no longer anonymous today, but that's not entirely true. We're still hearing of people hijacking people's names and brands on social networking sites like Twitter, for example, and any MySpace search for a famous celebrity will return hundreds of results purporting to be the "official" page for that person. But those days of "faking it" may be fading fast.

A precedent-setting case, the Lori Drew MySpace trial, has just come to an end. If you're unfamiliar, this was a case where an overprotective mom established a fake online identity to bully her daughter's rival. The judge's ruling has now criminalized the act of creating a fake persona online. In the case of Drew, most would agree she deserves the punishment she received. However, the aftershocks of the ruling could very well impact the online identity creation process for years to come if it's not overturned.

"If this verdict stands, it means that every site on the internet gets to define the criminal law," stated senior legal policy analyst Andrew Grossman for the Heritage Foundation. "That's a radical change. What used to be small-stakes contracts become high-stakes criminal prohibitions."

To address the needs of sites wanting weed out fake personas, users will have to be authenticated in new ways. Here, companies like Facebook, Google, and others are already in position to offer a solution for making sure people are who they say they are. Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, and Yahoo's Open Strategy, have all been busy trying to grab land on the new frontier of identity management. All of them want to be your de facto online identity provider.

No matter who wins, though, it's anonymity that loses. For the sites that move to these types of authentication methods, no longer will their users be able to create disposable usernames and passwords so they can troll around harassing others and leaving juvenile comments. Instead, all participants are themselves online  - and subject to the same standards for behavior that you would expect to see if you encountered them in a real-life public situation.

Even the utopian plans of OpenID, which MySpace pledged to support, is being embraced by other big names like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and even President-Elect Obama. With this federated identity, one set of credentials can follow you around the net, providing access to hundreds of sites. Although everyday computer users may not understand the technicalities of OpenID, the psychological impact will become apparent.

To the technically unsophisticated, the concept that you are one set of credentials, one username, one person across numerous sites will start people thinking that their activities can be traced, that they are not as anonymous as before...regardless as to whether or not that is true.

Finally, there is Google, the company we joke around as being "our new overlords." The reality is that we have, in fact, turned over vast amounts of our personal identity to this company in exchange for free webmail with pretty themes, snappy web browsing experiences, free analytics tools, more. As Allen Stern noted this weekend, "Google Knows Where I Am and Everything I Do." (If you want to jump even deeper down that rabbit hole, take a closer look at Google's User Data Empire). 

The terrifying vision of our future that Orwell imagined in his masterpiece, 1984, has been surpassed by miles. Big Brother staring at us through TV screens is nothing - instead, we've managed to create a world where we blindly, willingly, hand over our data and personal identities to a publicly traded company because they promised us they were trustworthy. And like the Eloi people in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, everything we need is provided to us - up until the time we become the dinner for the evils that lurk just below the surface.

In many ways, our society will struggle to adapt to the changes imposed by the lack of anonymity. Those embarrassing Facebook photos you got tagged in this weekend could lose you your job and prevent you from getting a new one. But how can we draw the line between what's public and private when so many of us have already decided that it's socially acceptable to shove cameras and video recorders in people's faces (without asking!) and publish the captured images to the net immediately?

The only way to prevent reputations from being damaged in the process is to always "be on your best behavior" in public. Frankly, that's no fun. No more wild boys nights out? No more getting silly and stupid with your friends? No - not unless you're willing to live with the consequences of having it plastered online in the morning.

When we reach the point where online anonymity has ended, instead of getting to be who we really are, the fact that we've become so aware of the fact that we're always being recorded, photographed, tracked, and traced, will have actually created a slightly altered personality instead. Like reality TV show contestants, the act of being observed will change our behavior. Our personal brand image will become our public identity and therefore our identity.

The truth is, giving up our online anonymity may not be all bad - we'll have a convenient, portable friend graph, for example. We can burn our notebook filled with our usernames and passwords. Our search data will be easily accessible from one place. But for the convenience of a simple login, searchable personal data and web history, and social networks filled with friends, we'll have exchanged a bit of who we are in the process. We'll pay for our services on the new internet with our identity and personal information. When the companies we sold ourselves to use it for their own benefits, our outrage will come too late. We'll only have ourselves to blame.

Image credit: iPhone with transparent screen, edans

Do we really need another shopping holiday? Some marketing firms and major retailers think we do. To follow up on the success of Black Friday, the start of holiday shopping season for American consumers, and Cyber Monday, the day when we surf online for the deals we missed at the mall, a mobile marketing firm called Mobigosee is planning to launch "Mobile Tuesday" on December 2nd of this year.

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The concept for Mobile Tuesday was born out of research that showed that the Tuesday after Thanksgiving was a slow shopping day, as are many Tuesdays throughout the year. To encourage the shopping madness to continue, Mobile Tuesday will send out coupons from various retailers to participants' cell phones. Mobigosee is paid only when those mobile coupons are redeemed.

According to AdAge, the advertising campaign, including radio and outdoor media, will launch tomorrow in 10 U.S. cities. Earlier this year that campaign was going to include a major car manufacturer and several well-known luxury brands, but due to the weakening economy, many of the early participants were forced to pull out as budgets were slashed. Tomorrow's launch will now just include McDonald's, Finish Line, and RedTag.

Mobile Tuesday's promotion will also have an online presence at a yet-to-be revealed URL. However, some 18,000 crafty shoppers have discovered the link thanks to sites posting Black Friday deals. Mobigosee already considers the campaign a success as they have surpassed their original goal of 5,000 and the campaign has not even officially begun.

I'm very pleased to announce that Bernard Lunn has joined ReadWriteWeb full-time as our Chief Operating Officer. Starting today, Bernard will assume responsibility for most of the non-editorial functions of our business - sales, business development and other operational matters. This allows me to re-focus on leading our editorial, including doing more writing! I will still be running the business, but Bernard will take a lot of pressure off me by running our sales and business development operations. He will also be leading our 'channel' strategy.

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Bernard Lunn is based in New York and he has an extensive background in media, having started in online publishing before the Internet (with Prestel in 1980!). He has lived in and started companies in Asia and Europe as well as America; he is Chairman of IQ Resource and Co-founder of iYogi.

Bernard worked for Aregon from 1979 - 1994, a pioneer in what is now called Publish & Subscribe technology. Bernard led sales and marketing for Aregon in London in the run up to the Big Bang deregulation in 1985, took the company into Europe after the crash of 1987 and then built the US operations from 1990 to 1992 in a recession, with minimal capital, against entrenched competitors. After Aregon merged with Kapiti (back office banking systems), Bernard took over and rejuvenated Kapiti's US operations before moving to Asia in 1994 and then the U.S. after that. You can read more about Bernard's background on LinkedIn.

Many of you probably know Bernard already as a writer at ReadWriteWeb (since July '07) and editor of our new Enterprise channel. He often focuses on business issues in his writing, so we're all excited to see that innovative theory being put into practise here at ReadWriteWeb!

Bernard is the third full-time member of ReadWriteWeb, after myself (the founder) and Marshall Kirkpatrick, VP Content Development who joined us full-time in August. The rest of our staff are contractors. I am proud of the whole team we have managed to put together without external funding - or indeed a presence in Silicon Valley until our recent writing hire of Lidija Davis.

Please join me in welcoming Bernard into his new role. We all have big plans for ReadWriteWeb and we're grateful for the continued support of our readers and sponsors.

While the majority of our day-to-day searches are easily handled by our favorite search engine, there are always those intensive searches that have you jumping from site to site - or opening a series of tabs - to find a good cross-section of information on a given topic. Even once you've established a preferred workflow for this kind of comprehensive searching, it can be time consuming to run through the process.

Wouldn't it be easier if you could simply enter one query and have it run through a bunch of search sites?

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Of course it would. And that's what makes Search.io so appealing. It's a meta search engine that searches a variety of sites - grouped by topic - and displays them as tabs to help you find information more quickly and easily.

To use Search.io, simply enter your search term and select your specific area of interest. Topics range from the default "search engines" to "blogs" to "torrents." There's even a search for popular "Web 2.0" sites. And for the more voyeuristic types, there's a listing of the latest searches.

While some of the tab sets seem to be stretching it a bit - I'm pretty sure the last time I cared about finding information in Alta Vista or Lycos was some time in the last century - the concept has a great deal of potential.

In fact, I've already added a couple of the search options to my toolbar - like the people and social bookmarks searches - and I'm going to keep using them to see if they speed my searches. I'm sure that once I've been using the service for a while, I'll find some ways to employ creative queries that will streamline my searching even further.

To test drive tabbed search for yourself, visit Search.io.

If the initial development race of Web 2.0 centered around "building a better social network" then the next phase will certainly focus on extending the reach of existing social networks beyond their current domain. How? By using the elements of the social graph as the foundational components that will drive the social Web. Where we once focused on going to a destination - particular social network to participate - we will now begin to carry components of social networks along with us, wherever we go. In the next phase of the social Web, every site will become social.

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To date, Google Friend Connect, Yahoo! Open Strategy, and Facebook Connect have all been rushing to take the lead in this next phase. Today, The New York Times reports that Facebook has taken another step forward by delivering Connect functionality to new crop of sites.

While the first group of sites that were allowed to leverage Connect - CBS The Insider, CNN The Forum, Connected Weddings, Global Grind, Govit, Indie GoGo, MoveOn.org, and Red Bull - were a good test case, Facebook is stepping into a whole new realm with its next round of sites - Discovery Channel, The San Francisco Chronicle, Geni, Hulu, and Digg. It's a safe bet that Digg will be the most interesting test case to date.

Facebook Connect proposes to make data and friend connections currently held within the walled garden of Facebook accessible to other services. This has two distinct benefits, one for the sites and one for Facebook.

For the participating sites, Facebook Connect provides more social functionality without a great deal of additional development. A new user can opt to share the profile information in Facebook instead of developing a new account. This gives the user access to the site and its services without the tedium of developing yet another profile on yet another site. In addition, users can use the relationship information in Facebook to connect to their friends on the other services. In short, it makes the new partner site an extension of Facebook.

And that hits upon the distinct benefit for Facebook: more data. Before Connect, Facebook's understanding of user behavior was relegated to what occurred on Facebook and, potentially, through third-party Facebook apps. With Connect, Facebook will extend its reach exponentially. In so doing, it will gather even more data on Facebook users, whether they're within the walled garden or not.

One of Facebook's primary marketing concerns with Facebook Connect has been to extend the value of its advertising-based revenue model while - obviously - avoiding the debacle that was Facebook Beacon. That has pushed Facebook to pursue a slow, methodical release of Connect, proceeding with caution to avoid any similar gaffs.

For now, they have the luxury of time. Facebook has continued to roll out their distributed social offering more quickly than the competition. And no doubt, they're learning a few things along the way that will give them a decided advantage over similar services.

But can they turn that early lead into a decisive victory?

If Facebook beats everyone else to the party, that doesn't mean they've won the race. The true value for Facebook is getting users to adopt Facebook Connect and extend their profiles to these external sites. Adoption will be the true deciding factor.

And that's why this new group of Facebook Connect sites will be interesting to watch. With the first group, Facebook was able to prove the concept had merit. With this latest group, they will be working to prove that users actually want to use the service.

Will Digg users be willing to connect their profiles and begin shouting to their Facebook friends? Is there a great deal of crossover between Facebook users and Discovery Channel? Will enough Facebook users watch the latest SNL skit on Hulu to provide useful data?

It's safe to assume that there is crossover between Facebook and any number of sites. But, the question remains: will the population of users who opt to use Connect be large enough to pay off? It's hard to say. We'll just have to wait and see how Connect performs in the wild.

The race to find a single sign-on and synchronization service has been on since social networking sites hit global acceptance several years ago. Today, after working under the radar for the past year, and with a member base of 5 million users, Power.com announced its global launch with a mighty claim: "Our platform will break down the boundaries between social sites and allow users to synchronize their logins, content, messages and friends."

Calling it a 'social inter-networking' service, CEO Steve Vachani today explained: "Social is about people, not about place; we're making 'where' irrelevant."

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Here at ReadWriteWeb, we have written extensively about the various efforts taking place to transform the Internet from the predominantly closed system it is today, to a more open and social experience; one where authentication is once only and data can be ported across sites. While we are certainly interested in any company that claims to have the answer, like everything else, time will tell.

Power is an interoperable platform that allows social network users to synchronize their profiles, content, messages and friends across various social sites. Right now, it works with Facebook, Hi5, MSN, MySpace and Orkut. LinkedIn is scheduled to appear before the end of the year, and Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, Skype as well as others should be part of Power's grid within the first few months of 2009.

According to Vachani, what Power is not trying to do is create one place online for people to send and receive updates, "we want people to continue using the sites they are currently using," said Vachani.

Additionally, Vachani explains that Power doesn't need the big websites to get together and agree to any commitment as the platform does not depend on their participation: "This independence contrasts with all previous efforts to bring social networks together, including Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, Microsoft Passport, OpenID and OpenSocial," Vachani said.

Once you register your social networks, Power shows you all the content from your registered sites; friends, IMs, e-mails, photos, data. Your home page will have three Power modules; your profile, your messages and your friends list. The technology is dynamic, so once you're logged in everything is served to you in real time.

If you want to reply to any of your messages, you can do it from within Power, in what Vachani calls 'Power Communicator' and send it to Facebook, MSN, SMS, MySpace, Gmail - all of them if you wish, or you can do it via your 'Power Friends' list:

"Profile Syncing" allows you to change your profile within Power, and gives you the option of updating it across all of the social networks Power supports.

According to Power, messaging is a prime driver of its user base. Users communicate with their friends across sites, via email and IM using Power Messaging to send millions of inter-networked messages every day and each message has a link back to Power.

Additionally, Power users have added Power widgets, links, and watermarks to their social network profile pages, so when friends visit, they click to learn more.

Headquartered in Rio de Janeiro Brazil, Power.com is a privately held company with 70 people. This month, Power.com is opening new offices in San Francisco, California and Hyderabad, India. The company received an $8 million Series A investment led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and investors including Esther Dyson. The company expects to have over 30 million registered users by the end of 2009.

://URLFAN is an indexing service which ranks websites by popularity, based on blog mentions. It's been around for a while, but we think it's reached the point now where it's a very useful tool to measure influence on the Internet. ://URLFAN is similar to Alexa and its measurement of popularity is reminiscent of Google's PageRank. ://URLFAN also has similarities to Technorati, except that instead of indexing just blogs - ://URLFAN indexes all websites.

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://URLFAN states that it parses "the millions of blog posts that are generated everyday, literally counting every mention of every website we come across." It claims to filter out spam, broken links, and "other various material" in order to come up with its rankings. As of right now, it claims to have ranked the popularity of 3,783,534 websites by parsing 124,732,102 blog posts from 2,068,929 blog feeds. Here is the top 10 currently:

1. en.wikipedia.org
2. flickr.com
3. youtube.com
4. google.com
5. imdb.com
6. myspace.com
7. nytimes.com
8. apple.com
9. twitter.com
10. washingtonpost.com

The entire top 100 is listed here. Where the comparisons to Alexa and Google fall down is that ://URLFAN doesn't measure how many people visit a website, only how many blogs mention it. So the resulting ranking list will inevitably be biased towards users of social media and in particular bloggers - which is still a relatively small proportion of the world. So although ://URLFAN states that "unlike Alexa, there is no approximating in our ranking system since we're using concrete data to generate the results", it's also fair to point out that the concrete data they're using is from a small subset of the population.

Still, we do think ://URLFAN is an interesting measure of influence. The social media users of this world are known to be highly influential when it comes to products, opinions and so on. So in that regard ://URLFAN's index is a decent measure of influence and therefore potentially valuable to marketers. We can see for example that Flickr and Twitter are being used a lot by influencers, which is good to know if you want to attract the attention of those people.

In terms of blogs, there are just under 10 independent ones that we counted in the top 100. ReadWriteWeb is one of them, in at #97.

Note: we noticed that many of the websites listed had a big jump in "positive mentions" in October-November, making us think that perhaps ://URLFAN's index increased markedly at that time.

Other independent blogs that make it to the top 100:

• techcrunch.com #25
• engadget.com #28
• boingboing.net #29
• huffingtonpost.com #32
• arstechnica.com #50
• lifehacker.com #63
• dailykos.com #82
• mashable.com #91

This is pretty good company to be in. It must be said too that there are a lot of mainstream newspaper websites in the list, so clearly 'old media' is still pretty influential!

Gladinet is a free Windows application that runs on your desktop and offers easy access to files stored online or across remote PCs. The company's goal is to provide a single platform from where you can manage files regardless of where they are stored.

While the company says it is like "building bridges among digital islands," we say it is an easy way to use Windows Explorer to drag and drop documents from the Web to your machine.

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To manage your digital content, Gladinet makes all of your files accessible from a virtual drive mapped into your Windows Operating Environment, letting you update and modify files stored on a variety of services such as Google Docs, Amazon S3 and Windows Live Skydrive.

Once updated, Gladinet uploads the new version back to its original home.

In addition to giving you easy access to files scattered across multiple machines and in the cloud, Gladinet's two other main features are remote access and on demand sharing of files with friends.

Watch the ten minute video introduction to Gladinet below, or download the PDF if you'd like to learn more.

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The word on the street this month is speech. (Which makes it the spoken word on the street.) Speech-based iPhone apps are just a throat-clearing for the stream of oratory that IBM says we can expect from computer users within the next five years.

It may finally be time I did something about that compulsive swearing issue, unless I want some seriously skewed search results. But that may only be the beginning.

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Just as a lot of us have sore arms, shoulders and necks from using mice and keyboards, we may find unexpected consequences from training our voices to use precise diction, simple sentences and clear directives. For instance, we may all end up sounding like voice-mail systems in real life. ("Darling, will you marry me?" "It sounds like you're asking me to marry you. I can help you with that.")

My biggest fear, though, is that we'll lose something far more precious than the nuance and subtlety of the human voice - and that's the ability to yell at a recalcitrant device with impunity. There's profound satisfaction in telling your computer to go screw itself, without worrying that it might attempt to comply with the instruction.

More Noise to Signal

Yet another report has surfaced that Microsoft is in talks to acquire Yahoo!. Not only is a different number being reported - $20 billion - but there is a new twist: Microsoft only wants Yahoo's online search business.

Given Steve Ballmer only last month said of a deal with Yahoo!: "There are probably still opportunities around search. I think it would still make sense economically for their shareholders and ours," could there be an element of truth to today's report?

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The deal, according to the Times Online, would see Microsoft injecting a new management team into Yahoo! with Jonathan Miller, the former chief executive of AOL and Ross Levinsohn, the former president of Fox Interactive Media at the helm.

The report also claims that Microsoft would provide a $5 billion facility for the team and Miller and Levinsohn would raise an additional $5 billion from external investors, giving the Miller and Levinsohn team a holding in excess of 30% of Yahoo! shares. External investors would then have the right to appoint three of Yahoo's eleven board directors.

And what does Microsoft want in return? According to the Times, Microsoft would get a ten year agreement to manage the search business, with a two year option to buy the Yahoo! search business outright for $20 billion.

With all the questions surrounding Jerry Yang's recent announcement that he is stepping down from the position of chief executive, and Yahoo's share price coming in just over a ridiculously low $9 a few weeks ago, this new report makes us yet more eager to know what will be next at Yahoo!

Update: Kara Swisher says: "Total Fiction": There Is No $20 Billion Microsoft Deal To Buy Yahoo Search

How can your mobile phone help you live a greener life? Quite easily, it turns out - if you have a G1.

Ecorio is a carbon footprint calculator developed by five guys from Ontario, and one of the ten apps awarded $275,000 by the recent Android Developer Challenge.

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How Ecorio Works

Once you've downloaded the application, Ecorio runs in the background and keeps track of your trips using G1's GPS navigation feature. Once your carbon footprint has been established, Ecorio lets you take action by offering three features: Reduce, Inspire, Offset - the 'rio' half of the product name.

Reduce

To help you reduce your carbon footprint, the app suggests carpooling options via Zimride, a ride sharing service in North America, of if you prefer public transit, Ecorio recommends the best routes using Google Transit.

Inspire

The folks over at Ecorio have also created a social networking feature that allows you to interact and chat with other Ecorio community members as well as view their profiles and see what their carbon footprint looks like; inspire others, let them inspire you.

Offset

The offset feature shows you what your carbon footprint means in context. For instance, Ecorio can show you by how many pounds you could reduce your carbon footprint if you choose to take transit for half the time, and then shows you how much you would save on gas in dollar value. Ecorio also offers you the opportunity to purchase offsets from Carbonfund, a non profit organization that supports renewable energy, energy efficiency and reforestation, directly from your phone.

While Ecorio is currently only available for the G1, the team is hard at work getting Ecorio ready to work across other mobile devices. Stay tuned.

Take a look at the video below to see Ecorio in action, when one of its founders, Jeff Kao talks with Phandroid's Rob Jackson. But be warned, unfortunately the audio is not great due to the crowd and background noise.

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According to the Pyjamas website, many people, when discovering Google Web Toolkit wonder why they can't use Python instead of Java.

With Pyjamas, this is now possible.

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Similar to GWT, a Java software development framework, Pyjamas is a cross-browser Web App development API that allows you to write your client side functionality in Python instead of Java.

While it looks like a desktop API, Pyjamas is a stand alone Python to JavaScript compiler, an AJAX framework / library and a comprehensive widget set API.

The advantage of using Pyjamas is that you can write Web applications in Python instead of HTML and JavaScript; rather than trying to fit as much HTML as you can into one page, you can reuse and import classes and modules.

Additionally, the AJAX library deals with the entire browser interoperability issue - you don't need to worry about the browser wars to make your app cross browser compatible for IE6, IE7, Firefox, Safari, Opera etc.

If you're interested in learning more, the Pyjamas site points to a tutorial, an online version of the Pyjamas Book, and other useful links.

Several months ago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created the Mobile Web Project in an attempt to provide up-to-date university information for its faculty, students and visitors over mobile devices.

Early next year, Information Services and Technology (IS&T), the central IT department at MIT, and the team responsible for the design, development and maintenance of the software, plans to open source the code.

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The MIT mobile site offers a staff and student directory, a campus map, the shuttle schedule, an event calendar, class announcements for students, emergency information, and status updates for many of MIT's tech services.

To access the site, all you need is a mobile device, a Web browser, and WiFi, and the MIT Mobile Web will automatically detect your device type and deliver content optimized for it.

According to Andrew Yu (Mobile Devices Platform Project Manager) at MIT IS&T, the technology behind the project includes WURFL and Python, XHTML and CSS, PHP, MySQL, SOAP and RSS.

The next step, according to Yu is to explore personalization and customization in a secure manner: "For instance, it would be great if students using mobile devices can securely check their grades or the balance of their MIT TechCash account and make simple transactions instead of having to pull out their laptop. Our team is brainstorming the next set of modules and arranging meetings with various departments at MIT. We expect to include content from MIT News, Campus Dining, TechTV, MIT World, and other areas in coming months."

If you're interested in finding out more, take a look at these two presentations:

MIT's Vision for Mobility[PDF]

Developing the MIT Mobile Web[PDF]

It's time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. On the trends side, we gave you an overview of health 2.0 and followed up with a RWW Live podcast on the topic. We also looked at the state of the art in recommendation technologies and offered some tips for the Internet bigcos as they head into 2009. On the product side, we further analyzed Google's search wiki experiment, listed the favorite mobile apps of the RWW writers and our readers, and looked at Firefox China version. We also have highlights from the Enterprise Channel and our brand new product that tracks hires in tech and new media, Jobwire.

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The Weekly Wrapup is sponsored by SemanticProxy.com:

RWW Live: Health 2.0

We have been tracking the so-called 'health 2.0' trend for some time now. We've covered the top health web apps, the trends to watch in health 2.0, and the latest industry stats. And we published a Health 2.0 update this week (see below). So in this week's episode of RWW Live, the ReadWriteWeb authors get together with a number of industry experts to discuss how the Web is changing health care.

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Health 2.0 Through the Eyes of a Diabetic - One Year Later

ReadWriteWeb founder/editor Richard MacManus: One year ago, I discovered that I had contracted Type 1 Diabetes. I was 36 at that point and it's relatively rare for someone of my age to suddenly get Type 1 Diabetes - indeed they used to call this form of diabetes "juvenile diabetes", because it mostly occurs in children. So it was quite a shock to discover that I had it! Immediately I looked to the Web to find out all I could about this condition. I discovered a thriving community of 'health 2.0' apps and social networks, which I then wrote about in this blog.

As it's now a year later, I thought it'd be good to review health 2.0. What has changed in web-based health services over the past year? And indeed what web tools do I use to help me manage diabetes?

Nine Recommendation Tools We Wish We Had

...And The Best Substitutes We've Come Up With So Far

There's so much content online every day that it's totally overwhelming. That's where good recommendation technologies and media outlets come in handy. As a blog that seeks to share the most interesting web technology and trends with readers, automated help with the discovery process is of great interest to us. In this post, we discuss some tools we wish we had and the closest makeshift substitutes we've been able to come up with. Maybe you'll find some of them useful or have even better recommendations to offer us and other readers.

2009 Tips for Big Web Companies

2009 is approaching quickly, and the consensus is that it's going to be a really tough year. The US financial crisis is triggering a global recession. Yet, a crisis is also a time full of hope. It is a time to re-think, re-tool, and get ready for the next upswing.

For big Internet companies, 2009 is going to be a very bad year for sure. Advertising profits are going to plunge, and consumers will spend less money overall, particularly on the web. There is little that can be done to change that. But what big companies can do is invest in innovation and killer moves that will bear fruit in the years to follow. Here is what we think would be cool for various big web companies to do in 2009.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

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

• Mindmeister is an online mind mapping tool.
• Pro Opinion allows you to get paid to take surveys.
• WildApricot is Membership Management Software.
• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• Glue enables you to connect with friends while browsing.
• Strands provides real-time recommendations of products.
• Direct Media Exchange is a solution for managing ad networks.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• VisualCV lets you stand out from the crowd when job-hunting.
• Quintura is a visual-based search engine.
• Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

Who's Getting Hired in Tech? Last Week's Jobwire Graphs

We all know the economy is in shambles and there are massive layoffs across most industries, including technology - but there are still new hires happening in tech and new media! Who's getting hired? That's what we're tracking at our blog Jobwire - the stories of lucky people with exciting new jobs.

Who's getting those jobs? What kinds of positions are being filled and in what sectors? Check out our first set of charts below from last week's aggregate activity on Jobwire to find out the answer to those questions.

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

Google SearchWiki is Not a Wiki

Late last week Google unveiled the first major change to its search interface since the introduction of multi-media ("Universal") results into the search results page. They called it Google SearchWiki.

It's a big deal, it's awkward, it's frightening, it's brave, it's already both loved and hated - but it's not a wiki. As Ward Cunningham, the man who invented wikis, told us in our initial coverage of SearchWiki, "Collectively editing thoughts is what leads to the unique wiki behavior..." Days into the experiment it's clear that this feature is more like a forum, and it's not a particularly well architected one at that.

Your Favorite Mobile Web Apps & Sites

One year ago we ran a contest asking you to tell us your favorite Mobile Web apps. From the resulting comments there were 5 Mobile Web apps that clearly stood out, with multiple mentions: Gmail Java app for mobile phone, Google Maps for Mobile, Opera Mini, Fring, Shozu.

Well, a lot has changed in the Mobile Web application world since then. The Apple App Store launched in July '08, prompting a wave of new third party iPhone apps. And we've seen innovation from Apple's mobile phone competitors: Google's Android (which has multiple app stores), Nokia, and Blackberry, and others. So what are your favorite Mobile Web apps and sites circa November 2008? The ReadWriteWeb authors listed their faves, plus we polled our friends in Twitter (subscribe to our Twitter account @rww).

Firefox China Edition: Everything a Local Browser Should Be

Did you know that the way you surf the internet may be influenced by your culture? In the U.S. and Europe, web surfers are leaning forward, one hand on the mouse and the other on the keyboard, typing and mousing equally. In China, however, the process is much different. Web surfers there tend to lean back from the monitor while keeping one hand on the mouse, the other hand dangling. The keyboard is used much less frequently as much of the navigation is done with clicks instead.

YouTube: More to Love

As the prices of professional quality video equipment continue to drop and the number of people with high-speed internet connections continues to increase, online video sites have been scrambling to keep up with their users' desires to deliver higher quality content to their viewers.

YouTube is no different. This week, they announced the latest enhancement to the YouTube platform - a widescreen video format across the site - which they hope will provide users with "a cleaner, more powerful viewing experience."

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Is SaaS Cheaper Than Licensed Software?

Most people quickly answer this question in the affirmative. We certainly do. However, there are people out there who aren't sure. They look at the monthly cost of a SaaS application and compare it to the equivalent licensed product over an extended period of time. Given enough time, you will eventually hit a point when the SaaS product appears to be more expensive. In this post we looked at it from the perspective of the total cost of ownership (TCO).

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.

You've probably seen lots of services that put pop up windows on top of links in web pages - usually for advertising and often in unhelpful places on the page. Could something like that be done well, though? Serial entrepreneur Craig Barnes believes it can be, and he's been working on it for more than 9 years.

Barnes says his new service Panels.net gets reader engagement numbers above 10% - an astonishing number in advertising. He says that's because his Panels are genuinely useful. At first blush they strike us as a little awkward but the potential here is big. Well selected, up-to-the-minute info about any link we see online sounds like a great idea - if it works.

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Panels.net requires one line of Javascript to be added to web pages. The service then ads a little icon to any link that goes to an "entity" - like a person or business. The links can be styled to your liking as a publisher, and when hovered over they produce a pop up "panel."

There's a site: search function for any domain in its panel, there's info pulled in from the Crunchbase database, there's a lot of information available in these little panels.

The variety of information is quite diverse and Barnes says what's served up is customized depending on what kind of entity you're looking at. You can see Panels in action over on Barnes' personal blog; the service will be rolled out to bloggers over the coming months.

This isn't a fly-by-night organization deciding to throw a handful of RSS feeds into a Javascript pop-up either. Craig Barnes is a four time CEO who started then sold for $140 million what's now one of the top handful of font management software companies in the world, Extensis, in 2001. He then served as the CEO for venture backed enterprise RSS company Attensa. Now he's out on his own, making hires and getting ready to launch a service for which neither the market nor the storage and delivery technology was prepared when he thought of it years ago.

Is it Unobtrusive?

As many of us found out with the recent launch of Google SearchWiki, adding symbols to a familiar, simple web page can be very disruptive. Ostensible Panels competitor Snap has faced years of criticism for their over-eager pop-ups.

We're not sure how Panels scores on obtrusiveness. Its popups are polite and relatively attractive, but the icons you have to click on to launch them are a little hard to swallow. It's a very fine line for services like this between being invisible and being used. We don't know what the solution is, but we do know it's a big issue.

Fortunately the usefulness is immediately apparent when you look at a Panels popup. If you're interested in an organization's web traffic, financial trends, recent mentions in the press - and many of us are - then for many links Panels will serve you well.

Barnes says that a signifigant amount of thought has been put into caching much of the information served up through Panels. That's smart and we hope it will make a big difference. When we tested the panels they were sometimes a little slow to respond and many of the display options just said "coming soon." We would need to see this resolved before we were to, for example, put Panels on our site.

There are some decisions that can be presumed in the user experience here that don't appear to be now. We need clicks to be kept to a minimum. If, for example, we've clicked on 3 Panels icons on a page and navigated to the website traffic numbers first for each of them - then we'd like to have the panel pop up and go immediately to the website traffic view. (Update: On second look, it appears this is done to some degree, at least the first level of navigation is repeated in subsequent Panels.)

The point is that the user experience needs to be as smooth as turning a box of cereal around to look right at its nutritional panel. Right now the user experience doesn't quite feel that easy.

It's early days, but we hope the company is prioritizing user experience. We suspect that forthcoming improvements in browser handling of Javascript will also help make Panels smoother to use.

Panels is a very good idea. If it can be executed upon well, and overcome the kinds of obstacles listed above, then we think this just-launched startup has as good a chance as any. We want it to work better than it does today, but we're sure it will.

Key information available about people and companies online could soon be at our fingertips at a moment's notice as we browse the web. That really is how it ought to be.

Today marks the second annual "Blue Beanie Day," an international online event in support of web design standards and accessibility. Participants post photos of themselves wearing blue beanies, or stocking caps, to their various online accounts in honor of web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman. Zeldman's blue beanie dominated the photo on the cover of his widely loved 2003 book, Designing With Web Standards.

We're big fans of web standards here at ReadWriteWeb and we'll tell you why.

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As we wrote in our coverage of the first annual Blue Beanie Day last year: standardization creates a playing field that supports innovation by making scalability possible. Standards make life easier for users and for developers, enabling a higher level of abstraction because a common foundation has been established and there's no reason to reinvent the wheel with every new website.

This year's been a big one for web standards; the President Elect just enabled users to login to comment on his website using the standard authentication protocol OpenID, for example.

So get your blue beanie or similar hat on and make yourself a photo. Your friends will wonder why you and others are wearing them online today and when they ask either you or Google - they'll end up thinking about the importance of web standards as a result.

For more info, visit Jeffrey Zeldman's blog and see if there's a group relevant to you participating, like the South African Web Standards and Accessibility Group, by whom we were reminded of today's event.

Apple has always been very protective over their proprietary software. The company doesn't want anything but iTunes to control an iPod - and for good reason, too. <script type="text/javascript">digg_url = 'http://digg.com/apple/EFF_To_Apple_Free_Speech_Isn_t_a_DMCA_Violation';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';</script><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script>The iTunes Store is a money-making machine with over 65 million active customers helping the company sell billions of songs, videos, and apps. Despite iTunes' popularity, however, there are still those out there who would rather run their own software.

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In order to make an iPod work with an alternative software program - like gtkpod, Winamp, and Songbird, for example - developers need to understand a file called iTunesDB. To prevent people from writing to this file, Apple protects it with a checksum hash which has to be reverse-engineered. Usually that process only takes a couple of days.

With the latest iTunes update, Apple has once again changed the hash, meaning it needs to be reverse-engineered again. The developers doing so collaborate together and share their thoughts on iPodhash, an open-source project hosted on Bluwiki, a free web site that lets users create wiki pages.

Now Apple has asked for that site to come down, a request that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says is out of line. Earlier this month, a lawyer from Apple's legal firm O'Melveny & Myers sent out a takedown notice to the site stating the content was illegal under the terms of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). According to the cease-and-desist email, the site is "disseminating information designed to circumvent Apple's FairPlay digital rights management system." It continued, "FairPlay is considered anti-circumvention technology under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA explicitly prohibits the dissemination of information that can be used to circumvent such technology."

The EFF has jumped on this case, saying that Apple "doesn't have a DMCA leg to stand on." According to EFF senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann, this move is effectively bending the law in order to stifle free speech. "Apple is essentially saying here that people can't even talk about the mechanisms that Apple uses to lock in its music to the iTunes software," he said.

The EFF web site goes into more details as to why the EFF believes Apple to be in the wrong, listing the numerous reasons why there's no DMCA violation on the site.

Since the Bluwiki site has complied with the takedown notice, the question is where does this leave the Linux community now? The main reason for the iPodhash project's existence is due to the fact that Apple does not provide a version of iTunes that runs on Linux. The project is an important community effort that helps Linux users create software programs that work with their iPods and iPhones.

Bluwiki's founder, Sam Odio, had said he was unsure if putting the site back online would be possible. Says Odio of his compliance with the takedown notice, "I regret having to do this. I may be able to put the site back online, but quite honestly it's unlikely because I can't afford a legal battle with Apple." Luckily for him, the EFF is now involved, so he will not have to worry with the legal fees.

Apple may only be protecting their very profitable iTunes business, but in this case, they're suggesting that the DMCA covers people merely talking about technical protection measures. If that's so, then as EFF says, "they've got a serious First Amendment problem."

You can follow this case's progress on the EFF's web site, Odio's blog, and on the iPodhash project's homepage.

The transfer of human intelligence to the machine is something the internet makes easy to do. With reCAPTCHA, we keep spammers at bay while helping digitize old books, Amazon's Mechanical Turk let