Bitstrips for Schools makes us want to go back to the third grade.

Bitstrips is an online tool for quickly and simply creating web comics, and the company has just launched a new product custom-tailored for the classroom. Kids get to be creative; teachers get a new, interactive tool to reinforce learning; and everyone goes home smarter and happier.

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A year and a half ago, Bitstrips launched at SxSW. At the time, we wrote that it was the "YouTube of web comics" and speculated on whether the app could become the breakout app of the show.

While the service has remained relatively under-the-radar, Bitstrips has managed to suss out their revenue streams and remains 100 percent bootstrapped, according to an email we received from co-founder Jesse Brown today. With Bitstrips for Schools, the company is offering a subscription-based service, adding even more revenue to their budget.

"We sold a license to the Ontario Ministry of Education," he wrote. "It just launched six days ago, and over 15,000 students have already signed up. They've been making over 1,000 comic strips a day."

Basic accounts give users (a.k.a. teachers) one private and secure virtual classroom; space for up to 40 students in each class; unlimited saved activities, comic strips, and characters; and unlimited use of the Shared Activities Library. They're also remarkably affordable at a $.9.95 monthly subscription rate. For $29.95 a month, users (a.k.a. schools) can purchase a package that includes up to six classrooms with space for 40 students each.

Now for the fun part: the comics! Check out this promo/demo video showing the software hard at work in a real classroom environment:

Students, individually or as collaborators, create characters and choose from a variety of scenes and props to create comic strips, which they can then share, print, and comment on. Teachers can review comics as they are created.

We can see kids having a ton of fun with this tool and learning a lot about design, content creation, and media while they're at it. The site also points out that comics could be an especially good tool for students of foreign languages.

Finally, we had to take the app for a test drive. We had a lot of fun - the interface is extremely intuitive and works well for kids of all ages. We'll be showing it to the kids in our lives, and we recommend that teachers give the 14-day free trial a shot, as well!

For those of you who are not teachers, we suggest taking a look at classic Bitstrips, where you can create your very own tech scene-themed versions of Family Circus. Or something less nerdy/ironic, if you prefer.

On the Delicious blog today, the social bookmarking site has announced a slew of enhancements in addition to the usual bug fixes for their most recent release.

From their interactive graphs to their iPhone-optimized mobile site to their tracking of who shares what items when, Delicious is showing a deep understanding of where the real-time web is heading and how traffic in this environment works. They're giving users and content creators the tools they need to optimize for this environment. Read on for a complete list of Delicious' new flavors.

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Search Refinement and Graphing
Refining search results by date is, as the blog post states, "sooo 1995!" Now, Delicious will let users search for results within a limit of just minutes, if they so desire.

They've also added interactive graphs for periods more than 24 hours before the current time. Users can highlight an area on the graph and search for results that appeared within that time frame.

Who, What, Where?
A feature we love is the addition of recipient tags to a user's bookmarks. The tags show what bookmarks were sent to a Twitter account or emailed to a friend.

iPhone-Optimized Mobile Site
iPhone users will now get a richer and simpler bookmarking and link-saving experience. Delicious' post reads, "Use your to:read tag and read all those articles you've been meaning to read. Alternatively, see what's popular on the 'Explore' page or search for whatever happens to peak your interest."

Graphs
The graphs seen on search results pages are now also available on URL details pages and in the revamped Tagometer badges, which will now show the number of saved links over time on a graph.

URL Details
Data on links is now available in a much more digestible format, complete with graphs, of course!

Especially for mobile users and those with social media obsessions, this new suite of features seems to be as useful as well as fun to play with.

Google is now giving webmasters the ability to prompt users for automatic translations of their pages. With the new website translator gadget, site owners can paste a short snippet of code into their websites and instantly increase their reach to up to 51 languages.

The gadget will automatically detect a user's preferred language, and if that user's language settings differ from the content on the gadget-enabled website, a frame will appear over the web page, prompting the user to click a button for instant translation of all text content.

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In a post today on the official Google blog, these screenshots were used to illustrate the simple, streamlined process:

Of course, the new feature will only work as well as Google Translate, which project manager Jeff Chin admits is best used to let readers "get the gist" of a page. Still, giving webmasters control over how users see their pages - with minimal effort and no downloads on the user's part - will likely do a lot to expand both the reach of a given website and the breadth of information available to Internet users around the world.

Today, Google announced a new search offering for mobile devices. The redesigned search experience will free handset users from having to type by including browseable categories. Local mobile search will also integrate with saved Google Maps information on a user's computer.

At first glance, this seems to be a great new tool to streamline the flow of information between our online and offline worlds. But how well does Google's new local mobile search work in reality?

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On the Google Mobile blog, project manager Joshua Siegel writes about using the search functions on a recent trip to Hawaii. "The new category browse feature made it easy to find a place to rent bicycles for a quick tour of the coastline. I just tapped on 'Entertainment & Recreation' and then 'Bicycles' to execute a search - no typing necessary. When it was time for scuba diving, I didn't see an appropriate category, so I started typing 'SCUBA' in the search box and clicked on a suggestion for 'Scuba Tour Agency.' A few hours later, I was petting a white-tipped reef shark!"

This video from the Google team shows more about how to star certain locations in Google Maps while at a computer and use the different features of local search for mobile:

Sounds great, right?

But when we tried to use Google's local search tab on a mobile device, some of the results we got were strange and disappointing. We were searching for "coffee" and "WiFi" in southeastern Virginia, and the top result was for the Hotel Taj Bengal Kolkat in West Bengal. And although we do enjoy the Cafe de Paris in Monte Carlo, we do not think this was an appropriate second result for local search in Virginia.

When we narrowed our search to just "coffee", we got better results, but who wants just coffee with no WiFi?

Next, we tried browsing the categories, again with mixed results. The ability to access saved and recent searches, however, was stellar and is probably users' best bet for getting around to local businesses while on-the-go.

With bleary eyes and bellies full of coffee, a roomful of investors, journalists and young entrepreneurs gathered this morning for the Bay Area TechStars Investor day. The Boulder and Boston-based startup incubator pulled out all the stops as 13 companies took to the stage to plead their case for funding. Below are the summaries of each.

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1. Everlater: Similar to Dopplr, Everlater is a travel site that offers users a chance to record, share and discover travel experiences. However, the difference between this service and some of the others ReadWriteWeb has covered is that Everlater allows users to create their content offline and sync it once they are within range of a Wi-Fi connection. From here, users can also share their stories via Twitter and Facebook.

2. Have My Shift: This service offers hourly workers a chance to coordinate a substitute worker to take over their shift. Rather than calling the entire employee list, users simply add their shift to the Have My Shift site and choose whether they'd like to add a few dollars to the wage as an incentive. From here, users broadcast their needs out to Twitter and Facebook. So far, the service has 80% market penetration with the Starbucks outlets in Chicago and is poised to tackle the country's 74 million hourly workers.

3. Localytics: This service is a cross-platform analytics program that offers real-time data on mobile developments. So far, the company offers analysis for Blackberry, Android and iPhone applications. Symbian, Palm and Windows Mobile integration is on the way.

4. Filtrbox: This service was a 2007 TechStars company and is currently raising its second round. The company tracks brand conversations via sentiment analysis and real-time monitoring dashboards. It also offers an enterprise solution where users can brand a white label API solution to produce their own company-wide internal dashboard.

5. Vanilla 2: Started in 2005, Vanilla is open-source forum software used to power thousands of sites across the web. Similar to WordPress' offerings, Vanilla now has two separate services: a new a la carte hosted service with advertising revenue and a free open-source service.

6. LangoLAB: LangoLAB offers users a chance to learn new languages through popular online video clips. The service translates media from sites like YouTube and College Humor and offers complimentary concepts, vocabulary and tests. The company plans on charging for premium clips in the near future and is looking to expand into Asia.

7. Next Big Sound: This service offers analytics for musicians and their bands. Similar to Band Metrics, the service measures fan data spread across disparate services like Twitter, Facebook, Last.FM and Imeem. The company's mission is to track fan interactions and create better leads for publicity, concert tours and fan engagement. For a more in-depth look at this company, check out our past coverage in the ReadWriteStart channel.

8.Take Comics: This service is best described as the "iTunes of Comics". Users install the store to their desktops and mobile phones and check out their favorite comics in an App Store-like environment. Rather than reading cumbersome PDFs, panels appear one at a time and users can increase text size for mobile devices. The service offers social features such as Twitter integration and friend-based comic recommendations. It is a well executed tool with multiple points of purchase including shopping alerts for missing issues and "buy all" buttons to encourage diehard fans to complete their collections.

9. ReTel Technologies: This service is an analytics tool that offers managers a chance to reassess their work environments. The service breaks down surveillance videos into digital snippets and helps franchise owners determine cleanliness, worker habits and efficiency. Dunkin' Donuts and Shell franchise owners are already testing ReTel for pilot programs.

10. AccelGolf: This service is a GPS rangefinder and mobile scorecard. It allows golfers to analyze the performance of their strokes and new clubs. The company offers a database complete with course data from more than 60 countries.

11.SendGrid: This cloud-based service offers enterprise clients a chance to analyze and improve their transactional email systems. The company helps ensure that purchasing orders and invoices are delivered to clients with little to no coding for customized campaigns.

12.OneForty: This service is best described as "Twitter's app store". ReadWriteWeb covered the company's funding announcement just 15 days into the TechStars program and it has since grown into a full-fledged web phenomenon. After a barrage of press, the company has gone from being Twitter's unofficial app store, to it's official one. Founder Laura Fitton explains that Twitter has already started referring its developers to her community.

13. Sensobi: Sensobi is a mobile address book for business professionals. The service organizes all of your emails and calls on a contact-by-contact basis and encourages you to maintain the ties you need to keep your business afloat. Users can schedule reminders to ensure that they're giving the proper attention and care to their colleagues.

Twitter just announced a major new feature soon to launch: the ability to create sharable lists of users around topics of interest. This will tackle several problems with one feature: the ability to discover diverse high-quality users quickly and easily and the undue power Twitter HQ has had as the only curator of lists on the site so far.

Curation of dynamic topical expert sources is an act of poetry. Just like Twitter has caught on faster than RSS, Twitter Lists will probably catch on a lot faster than OPML has. If you've seen the new service TweepML then you've got the idea. This is going to be a very big deal.

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"For example," Nick Kallen writes on the company blog, "you could create a list of the funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, local businesses, friends, or any compilation that makes sense."

Twitter says that the lists won't just live on the site, either; there will also be a Lists API available to outside developers. That could mean that clients like Tweetdeck, Tweetie and Seesmic will no longer have any excuse to keep your group lists locked-in.

There is some question whether having Twitter control this technology, instead of an outside, standards-based body like TweepML is trying to be, is going to be a good thing. We'll have to see how they implement the feature and the API.

The possibilities here are endless, hopefully we won't have to wait too long for this feature to go live.

Google will unleash 100,000 invites to use Google Wave later today. While Wave itself is obviously an exciting product, Google is also trying to create a developer ecosystem around Wave and has selected six Wave extensions to feature as good examples of what developers will be able to do with Wave: a competitive Sudoku game from LabPixies, a teleconferencing extension from Ribbit, video chat from 6rounds, travel planning from Lonely Planet, a weather widget from AccuWeather, and a map widget courtesy of Google Maps.

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We got to try the Ribbit and 6rounds extensions first-hand over the last few days and they have turned out to be pretty interesting.

The Ribbit conference call extension allows you to quickly set up a teleconference in Wave. Calls can be routed to any phone, and you can use the wave simply to provide context for the call or to keep notes. Because Google doesn't currently give developers direct access to contact information, you have to type in your own number, but otherwise the operation couldn't be any easier.

While Ribbit focuses on telephone, the team at 6rounds has built a video chat gadget. Currently, 6rounds supports only one-on-one chats, but even given this limitation, the app builds nicely on Google Wave's real-time emphasis and allows you to watch YouTube videos or play games with your friends.

We didn't get to test the Lonely Planet, AccuWeather and LabPixies extensions yet, but they all look pretty useful as well. When we talked to the Wave team earlier this week, they especially raved about LabPixies Sudoku game, which looks to be quite addictive.

• Invite your friends. You will be able to nominate up to 8 of your friends for a Wave account. Wave is a lot more fun when you have somebody to help you test it.
• When you start a new wave, click on the Google icon. From there, you can add links and search and embed YouTube videos and images.
• Try to add a map (just click the Google Maps pin). As you scroll, everybody else in the wave will see a live update of what you are doing.
• Need to vote on where to go for dinner tonight? Try the Yes/No/Maybe gadget.
• Try the 'playback' feature - it replays a wave step by step. This comes in really handy if you want to check who has made what revisions.
• Invite a robot to your wave. Just add elizarobot@appspot.comto your contacts, for example, and you will have a robot shrink to chat with while you're waiting for your friends to sign up.

• Wave works in most modern browsers (and even runs on Safari on the iPhone), but it works best in Google Chrome (IE users will be prompted to install Chrome Frame).
• To add a contact to a wave, just start a new wave and drag and drop the icon from the Contacts sidebar to the new wave.
• The blue lines that appear when you scroll through a list show you where your reply goes. Just click on the line and a reply will show up.
• Pressing 'Enter' will take you to the next line in your reply - you have to hit "Shift + Enter" to finalize your reply.
• Private replies are hidden in the pull-down menu at the right edge of the message that you are editing.
• Stuff will break - remember that this is a very early beta!

Feel free to post a comment if you have additional tips and tricks (or favorite robots and extensions) you would like to share.

The City Council of Portland, Oregon unanimously approved a resolution today that directs the city government to open data to outside developers and encourages adoption of open source solutions in technology procurement.

Like the creation of railroads and highways fostered economic development in the past, giving software developers access to a landscape of municipal data could be the beginning of a foundation for a new era of innovation.

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"This [resolution] will increase efficiency in local government... democratize public data itself... and it will foster innovation among Portland's world class software community," said Skip Newberry with the Mayor's Office in his testimony according to a report on the local tech blog Silicon Florist.

The full text of the resolution has been posted as text (from a PDF) on the same blog.

Portland joins San Francisco, Chicago and Vancouver, British Columbia as cities with major initiatives to offer municipal data in formats that will enable independent developers to build new applications leveraging that data. Making municipal data openly available for developers could be the contemporary economic equivalent of paving roads and installing electricity that can be used to open new businesses and better serve the people living in that city.

Portland, Oregon isn't new to tech innovation, of course. It's a place where the city bus system has its own app store, it's home to red-hot mobile development shops like Small Society (built iPhone apps for Starbucks, WholeFoods etc.) and Urban Airship (iPhone push infrastructure) and it's the home of Linux creator Linus Torvalds, wiki inventor Ward Cunningham and one third of the staff of ReadWriteWeb - amongst other geekery.

What could come next? How about more cities getting on board, a national or international standard for municipal data and delivery of that data in real time? One Prefecture in Japan has announced that it will promote the mobile Augmented Reality app Sekai Camera to display historical data about locations in the area. Seeing individual cities move in this direction is a great start.

What US city will move in favor of open source and open, structured data next? Seattle? New York? Someplace in the Mid West? Place your bets now as these are unlikely to be isolated developments.

Photo: "Max" Creative Commons by Stu Seeger

Social media aggregator Cliqset today announced a new beta version of its platform that aggregates activity feeds from 70 different social media sites, transforms them into normalized Activity Streams standard data and then pushes them out in real time.

The company's offers multiple ways to access the data through its API but also hopes that more users will stick with its own, now much improved, user interface. The first 200 ReadWriteWeb readers to click this link will gain access to the new beta version of the site.

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What does Cliqset offer that the Facebook-acquired FriendFeed doesn't? According to Cliqset: "We're much more standards compliant, we allow broader sharing, granular filters, a different permissions model, a much more open API and we have more services tied to ours (70 vs. FriendFeed's 50)."

The most important thing Cliqset is doing is probably transforming all these different update feeds into the standardized format called Activity Streams. That format is already being supported by Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live and Opera.

Michael Calore explains what Cliqset is doing with Activity Streams as follows:
A huge bonus is that Cliqset is using the emerging Activity Streams data specification to make all this happen. Activity Streams is an open-source XML-based format that uses a common actor-verb-asset model to report an activity on a social website. For example, "Amy shared a video" or "Mike rated this photo." It's a simple organizing principle that allows social web services to more easily talk to each other about what their users are doing.
But if not everyone is reporting their users' activity data using a common model, it becomes harder to get two services to talk to each other. And only a handful of sites are supporting Activity Streams right now.
As Cliqset co-founder Darren Bounds tells Webmonkey, Cliqset is actually re-writing all the aggregated data streams into the Activity Streams format, physically cleaning up the social web's mess as it goes.

Cliqset tells us that it's working on making a streaming API for this data available and let us in on some secret projects to bring real-time cross-platform data flowing to places around the web that it's not available today.

Right now you cannot easily pull Activity Streams feeds through Cliqset for people who have not signed up for the service themselves. It would be great if Cliqset began consuming the Webfinger protocol, for example and let me point at all my Google Contacts, discover their social media sites from around the web and then transform those into Activity Streams for consumption in other apps. That future isn't here and it may never be, but a web user can hope.

For now the company is using the long polling method and this newly normalized data to do some impressive things with its own user interface. Michael Calore goes into depth about that part of the project on Wired.com's WebMonkey blog. We'd like to recommend his post as our Real-Time Web Article of the Day, in fact. Check it out for a closer look at the innovative effort underway at Cliqset.

We're highlighting one article about the real-time web from off-site every day, leading up to the October 15th ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit. Data normalization, Activity Streams, filtering and APIs are going to be big topics of conversation there. We hope you'll join us for those conversations.

Brion Vibber, CTO of Wikimedia and lead developer for Wikipedia and MediaWiki, announced today that he's leaving the company to work for StatusNet (formerly Laconica) as their chief architect.

StatusNet is the open-source microblogging platform that powers sites such as identi.ca, which impressed us from its inception as a "framework for a distributed network of federated microblogging services." Read on for more details on what Vibber will be doing there.

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In a post today on the Wikimedia technical blog, Vibber wrote that he had been involved with StatusNet "as a user, bug reporter, and patch submitter since 2008," and that his being hired coincided with StatusNet's ramping up for "a 1.0 release, hosted services, and support offerings."

Vidder hard at work at the Wikimedia Foundation office.

And according to this StatusNet announcement, Vibber's job description will revolve around "architecture and development of the core StatusNet microblogging software, as well as ancillary services to support the status.net platform." And in addition to launching a first release and public signup over the next few months, it is hoped by StatusNet leadership that Vibber's "natural skills as a mentor and leader will help build our Open Source developer and user community."

Although Vibber's new duties will commence on October 12, he will continue to be involved in Wikimedia development and will remain in the Wikimedia office until the end of 2009 "to make sure all our tech staff has a chance to pick my brain as we smooth out the code review processes and make sure things are as well documented as I like to think they are," he wrote.

In an interesting study in open-source, free-as-in-freedom/free-as-in-beer cross-pollination, StatusNet founder Evan Prodromou is also known for his work in the wiki community, launching Wikitravel and helping with MediaWiki development.

In a recent panel on online reputation management, a group of real-world recruiters and consultants convened to discuss how they saw social media use in both the general populace and among job candidates.

Social media types insist on transparency at the cost of every other virtue, including discretion. While noble, this point of view is not necessarily realistic in day-to-day American business and personal interactions.

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A new service called Sub.Diggerplus vastly improves the user experience for social news mega-site Digg and its social networking features. The service shows a Digg user's friends' link submissions in an attractive slideshow of live pages inside a frame. Digg's own view of friends' submissions is cluttered with extra pageviews and not a lot of fun to use. Sub.Diggerplus could make users want to make more friends and increase small group engagement with Digg, something the social networking feature of the site has always aimed for but never really delivered. So what's the catch?

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Digg users are afraid to use Sub.Diggerplus because Digg has banned users in the past for using scripts to make digging your friends' links faster and more thoughtless. Given Digg's moves today to further open up its API for 3rd party applications, its own highly controversial introduction of a tool-bar frame and the fact that Digging your friends' links without actually looking them is much easier on the Digg site than it is with the Sub.Diggerplus service - given all that, banning people for using the site would be supremely ironic. On Twitter and Digg, though, people are expressing both excitement about the interface and fear of getting banned for using it.

To use Sub.Diggerplus just visit the page and enter a username. If it's your username, all the better - but it doesn't have to be because no login is required. Then you'll taken through a slideshow of all the most recent submissions from friends of the account you entered by name. If you are logged in to Digg, then you'll see the Digg toolbar at the top of the page to vote on the links you're viewing. All of that will go on inside another Sub.Diggerplus frame - it's my Digg in a box, you might say. (Sorry!)

The Digg method of viewing friends' submissions shows you links not directly to the pages submitted but to their item pages on Digg with comments, etc. It's pretty unwieldy but it means more pageviews for Digg. Sub.Diggerplus, on the other hand, makes friends' submissions a lot more fun to stumble through.

So will Digg allow the app to be used - or will the company ban people who use it? It would be absurd for them to ban users on account of this service (unless there's some detail we're not seeing in this story) - but are you ready to risk having your account nuked on the biggest social news site on the web? There's been no word that we've seen from Digg management, but the fear around applications like this can't help but be a hindrance to adoption of the API, for small innovators on the margins at least. Presumably Digg API implementations by large trusted old-media brands will feel nice and safe and see plenty of adoption.

In the meantime - I'll see you at Sub.Diggerplus.

Tweetdeck, one of the most popular Twitter clients on the desktop launched its iPhone app today, just in time for the release of the iPhone 3.0 update. That, by itself, would be interesting news, but TweetDeck's desktop app also got a major overhaul, in part to support syncing with the iPhone app. In addition, TweetDeck on the desktop now gives users the ability to mange multiple accounts and the 10 column limit has been lifted. Among other things, TweetDeck now features a 'conversation window,' which presents an entire dialogue at once. TweetDeck can now also recommend new and interesting users to follow, and it is now very easy block a user and report a spammer directly to Twitter.

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The iPhone app is available now (iTunes link), the desktop client will be available for download at 9pm Pacific tonight.

We weren't able to test the iPhone app in detail yet, but based on what we have heard about it and the screenshots we have seen, as well as the information we have received from TweetDeck itself, this app looks like it might be a winner. Overall, the iPhone app will recreate the look and feel of the desktop app, with the ability to flick back and forth between different columns, create and manage groups, etc.

The most important aspect of the app, though, is that changes in one app (desktop or iPhone) will automatically be synced with the other app (this includes groups, columns, etc.).

On the desktop side, we are very happy to see the end of the 10 column limit. As we tend to use TweetDeck as a research tool, we love the fact that we can now see more groups and searches right in TweetDeck without having to resort to other tools.

Another neat new feature is the addition of a 'reply to all' feature. Thanks to this, you can easily reply to all users mentioned in a tweet, instead of just the user who sent the message.

There are also a number of other new features in the desktop app, including the ability to referenced another user (marked as 'RE' in tweets), support for video playback from Qik and 12seconds, as well as the ability to see a list of local (instead of Twitter-wide) trends.

Overall, this is an important new version of TweetDeck, and the addition of the iPhone app with syncing is probably the killer feature here. Other Twitter clients also feature desktop and mobile apps (Nambu, Tweetie, and Twitterific, for example), but while a lot of TweetDeck's competitors have promised a similar feature, none have delivered this functionality yet.

Twubs - it's not the mean-spirited nickname the kids called us in high school, nor is it the Miami Vice detective opposite Don Johnson. Similar to Hashtags.org, Twubs is a Twitter aggregator that allows users to contribute on breaking news, popular trends, shared conferences and memes such as #followfriday and #musicmonday. In addition to indexing basic tweets, the service also displays photos and videos that share a common hashtag. Earlier today Twubs launched a free conference suite in the hopes that conference planners will take a cue from Gnomedex founder Chris Pirillo and incorporate back channels and live feeds into their events.

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Launched in April 2009, the original Twubs allows users to edit topical pages and see aggregated media files. In addition to hashtag and image aggregation, users can tweet invites to followers, embed feed widgets, and add additional tag aliases. The new conference suite builds on this experience and offers event planners new options like embedded live streaming footage, meet up scheduling, and perhaps most interesting, the ability to moderate the broadcast of a live Twitter feed.

This means that event questions and comments can be broadcast on a large screen without the fear that presenters will be publicly heckled. CEO Tony Ferraro walked ReadWriteWeb through the product and showed us how administrators can edit screen headers and footers, remove comments, and vary the speed of the broadcast. In the spirit of openness, it's of course discouraged to go overboard and ban criticism; however, it's totally acceptable to do away with irrelevant or spam-related tweets that do not contribute to audience dialogue.

The broadcast tools coupled with attendee-based media aggregation, make Twubs conference suite a cross between live broadcast tool Ustream and community site Ning. Twubs also offers planning tools for Tweetups and conference-related mixers so that event attendees can instantly manage their RSVPs from one page. As the company plans to roll out third party calendar integration and an iPhone app in the coming months, Twubs might also begin to resemble Facebook events.

The question remains whether Twubs can deliver as an all-in-one conference solution, but judging by reviews on its initial offerings, the company is well on its way.

The Washington Post has reported that a Nevada newspaper has been served a grand jury federal subpoena to reveal the identities of commenters on its website. The newspaper editor is fighting the request.

The editor, Thomas Mitchell, received the subpoena after his paper covered the prosecution of business owner Robert Kahre in a federal tax fraud case. He is quoted as saying that anonymous speech, including online comments, is "a fundamental and historic part of this country," but that his publication might cooperate if specific crimes or threats were a factor.

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The subpoena is asking for commenters' addresses, birth dates, genders, telephone numbers, ISPs, IP addresses, and credit card numbers, all for comments of a generally one-sided but relatively harmless nature. As is common on many websites, including this one, comments are permitted under pseudonyms.

U.S. Assistant District Attorney J. Gregory Damm's name appears on the subpoena. He was also the prosecuting attorney for the case which was the subject of the original report.

Comments from the article in question call Damm "a socialist, fascist Mormon" (which is a radical contradiciton in terms) and a "Nazi moron," which is a lovely example of Godwin's law. Another comment reads, "The sad thing is there are 12 dummies on the jury who will convict him. They should be hung along with the feds." On the same website, comments of an antisemitic, extremist nature exist and occasionally abound.

Enterprise microblogging app Present.ly has added two new features. The first, announced on the 12th, is the ability to import external RSS feeds directly in to your stream. The second, revealed today, is a bevy of new metrics and statistics on claimed Present.ly accounts.

While neither is exactly groundbreaking in microblogging, their addition is a boon to users. They're also a sign that the company can keep pace among a throng of swiftly-moving competitors - such as Yammer and Socialcast - that have already added similar functionality.

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But that's because it's become an essential extension of microblogging for companies, allowing employees to easily keep track of outside information sources, such as Twitter accounts and searches, Delicious bookmarks, blog searches and basically anything you find relevant. Other nifty attributes include the ability to mute a feed temporarily and for Present.ly groups to have their feeds.

The stats included are broken down in to those for individual users, groups, or entire accounts. You can view the data on how one of your team members uses the service, how a group (such as a department) uses it, or the trends for your entire enterprise. In addition to simple graphs and number counts, there are charts and maps related to your usage.

Glue, a browser-based social network that appears on sites such as Amazon, Last.fm, Netflix, Yahoo! Finance, Wine.com, and Citysearch, today announced their public API for third-party developers.

Glue joins a family of available semantic APIs with a mix of unique semantic and social API features. The API is currently demoed in three apps: Glue Stream, Glue Quilt, and Glue Spider.

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Glue Stream is "Glue Live" and shows what is happening on Glue in real time. Glue Quilt shows trending topics over the past 7 days. Glue Spider shows connections between people and sites around the web.

Glue's API is part of an expanding group of semantic web APIs such as Reuters' OpenCalais, Dapper, Freebase, Evri, and Zemanta, all of which helped develop links and relationships between terms and concepts.

According to the company's website, the Glue API complements the existing semantic web family in two ways. "First, it brings the exciting social dimension to the equation, revealing how people connect around things and concepts instead of pages. Secondly, Glue enables developers to get meta data and related links for books, music, movies, video games, topics, stocks, stars, artists, wine from hundreds of popular sites, turning these sites into databases."

Currently the API is free and limited to 5,000 calls per day. For more usage developers should email support@getglue.com.

While Facebook has been busy working on its new constitution in an effort to appease its increasingly anxious community over the past few days, the second application of dubious intent made its way onto the troubled site in the space of a week. The bad guys, it seems, have perfect timing.

Trend Micro reported Thursday that a rogue Facebook application had been posting false notifications to user profiles, telling them they have violated Facebook's Terms of Service and directing them to a malicious site for more information.

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The alert read: "[Friend's name] has just reported you to Facebook for violating our Terms of Service. This is your official warning! Click here to find out why you were reported! Request Facebook look at what has happened and rule immediately."

Users who followed the link were directed to another application which, when installed would proceed to spam the affected user's friends with the same notice, all the while gathering personal information.

This was the second scam for Facebook this week, following the 'Error Check System' app that sent notifications to users informing them that friends had encountered errors when trying to access their profile and providing a malicious link to view the error message.

While the Trend Micro report advised users to "exercise extreme caution when surfing," and that Facebook review its application hosting policy, Graham Cluley points to the real culprit: Facebook itself.

"Third-party applications are not vetted before they are made available to the public. So, even as Facebook stamps out one malignant application, it can pop up in another place like a poisoned mushroom with a different name."

Although we're excited about the prospect of increased openness at Facebook, and impressed by the speed with which Mark Zuckerberg promised to bring democracy to Facebook after last week's user revolt, we can only hope that the giant Facebook gives some serious attention to the way it accepts third party apps - and soon. Having a bad month is one thing; having a bad year is quite another.

Image credit: Trend Micro

"By 2010 we will have run out of IP addresses if we don't do something about it," Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist and the man commonly referred to as "the father of the Internet," told ReadWriteWeb last month. (Video embedded below.)

With the number of Internet-enabled devices particularly mobile phones soaring, very few IP addresses remain vacant, and with only about 20 per cent of the world connected to the Net, that's a problem. And consumers, if you think this doesn't affect you, think again. That latest gadget you bought - is it IPv6 compatible?

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To fully understand IPv6 we need to take a look at TCP/IP and this means a quick trip back in time.

It all started way back in 1969, when the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was using a transmission protocol known as the Network Control Protocol(NCP) to transmit data across networks. Protocols, if you think of them as languages, are needed so that networks and computers can talk to one another.

Expensive, cumbersome and slow, NCP was found to be limiting and in 1973, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a research program, known as the Internetting project, to develop a better communication protocol.

The networks which emerged from this research became the basis for what we know as the Internet, and the protocols developed during this time became known as the TCP/IP Protocol Suite.

At its most basic level, the IP part ensured packets were routed to the right place by providing unique identifying numbers to all hosts connecting to the network, and the TCP part managed the transfer of that data.

On January 1, 1983 NCP was deemed obsolete when the ARPANET switched over to the new TCP/IP protocol suite, and as a result, marked this date as the official birth date [for some] of the Internet.

According to the Living Internet, after Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn designed TCP/IP, DARPA contracted with three sites to develop operational versions: BBN, Stanford and the University College London, and four increasingly better versions of TCP/IP were developed: TCPv1, TCPv2, which then split into TCPv3 and IPv3. Stability finally arrived with TCPv4 and IPv4; the standard protocol we know and use today.

IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses, which limits the address space to 4,294,967,296 (232) possible unique addresses. But, as some of these are reserved for specific purposes, it reduces the total number available.

IPv6 with its 128 bit addresses increases the number of potential unique addresses to 3.4e+38 (a little bit more than 340 trillion, trillion, trillion). Additionally, it is designed to rectify issues found with IPv4 such as data security.

IPv6 is expected to slowly replace IPv4, with the two protocol systems expected to run simultaneously for many years.

Typically, the most often asked question when talking about IPv4 and IPv6 is what happened to IPv5? IPv5 was known as an experimental streaming audio/video protocol. According to Raffi Krikorian, a protocol named ST, the Internet Stream Protocol was created in the late 1970's and two decades later revised to become ST2, at which point it was implemented in commercial projects by IBM, NeXT, Apple and Sun. ST and ST2 were already given that magical "5" notes Krikorian. Given it had little to do with the fundamental structure of IP addressing, IPv5 is not commonly recognized.

While the establishment of a single networking protocol was an important step toward maintaining order in the then new internetworked world, no one could have guessed the growth of the Internet, nor the number of IP addresses required to cover the ever growing demand.

"My only defense is that decision was made in 1977, at a time when it was uncertain if the Internet would work," Cerf said recently, adding that a "128-bit address space seemed excessive back then."

Watch our video below to get Cerf's take on IPv6 - and why switching over is so important.

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Recorded at SMX West 2009 by ReadWriteWeb
Vint Cerf image: Vint Cerf playing Spacewar on PDP-1
Credit: Flickr Joi

Facebook launched its first social widget for use outside of Facebook's own site today: the Comments Box. The Comments Box is a comments widget that was built on top of Facebook Connect, and that will allow bloggers and publishers to easily implement a Facebook Connect enabled commenting system on their sites. A number of sites already used Facebook Connect to make it easier for their users to sign in to their services and leave comments, but this is the first time that Facebook itself ventures into this business.

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Google, of course, already offers a similar service with Google Friend Connect, though this offers far more features than just the ability to leave comments. Google also allows users to sign in with an OpenID account, as well as with accounts from other vendors, including Yahoo and AOL. In the announcement, Facebook stresses that this is just the first of a number of social widgets based on Facebook Connect that the company is planning to release in the near future.

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It is important to note that other commenting services like JS-Kit already allow users to use their Facebook Connect logins - something that Facebook actually acknowledges in its announcement.

Publishers will be able to customize the widget and moderate comments, though it is not clear what this moderation will look like. Users without a Facebook Connect ID will also be able to leave comments, but we will have to wait and see how well Facebook's widget will be able handle the inevitable spam that will come with this.

One nice feature of the Facebook Connect widget is that your comments are not only posted to your Facebook profile, but that additional comments that your friends make on Facebook in reference to your comment will also appear on the originating site. This, as Nick O'Neill points out, is similar to what a number of blog plugins like IntenseDebate are doing with comments left on Friendfeed right now. For publishers, this also means that their content is going to get a wider exposure on Facebook.

However, while being able to use the Facebook Connect ID to sign into a comments system is nice, most publishers are probably looking for a system that can handle a wider range of sign-on credentials. Facebook is now a member of the OpenID Foundation, but the widget only supports Facebook Connect IDs.

What is most important about this announcement, though, is that Facebook continues to open up its platform to third parties. Earlier this month, third-party developers got access to users' status updates, notes, and links. Now, Facebook is allowing bloggers and publishers to implement some of Facebook's core features outside of Facebook's own site. Facebook use to be a closed off silo, but this is changing rapidly right now and it will be interesting to see how Facebook's users will react to this.

RackSpace recently published a survey on cloud hosting. The company asked 1500 small and mid-sized businesses in the US and UK what they knew about cloud hosting and if they intend to use it. The results of the survey may surprise you. One key finding was that there is a large gap between small and mid-sized businesses in their adoption of cloud hosting.

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Mid-sized businesses knew significantly more about cloud services or were at least using them or planning to use them in the near future. Small businesses, on the other hand, were ill-informed, and 59% of those surveyed had no plans to use the cloud at all.

We spoke with Jonathan Bryce, co-founder of Mosso, a RackSpace company. He was surprised at this finding because, as he saw it, cloud computing is ideal for small businesses. The services are generally easy to get started with and don't require an IT staff or capital equipment. Also, small businesses usually have only one or two decision-makers, so the process should ostensibly be much easier than in larger companies.

Jonathan also noted that the hype surrounding the cloud (whether related to hosting, applications, computing, etc.) is confusing to people, particularly small-business owners. While I'm a little surprised at the size of the gap, small-business owners I know are not technically savvy and don't wake up in the morning wondering how they can cut costs by "leveraging the cloud." They keep things very simple and focus on the everyday tactical decisions to operate their business.

While cloud hosting would save them money, scale their business where needed, and remove headaches, these owners usually have other problems on their mind, like staying in business and keeping employees and customers happy.

Jonathan put his finger on how to change this trend. The small-business community needs more education on the specific solutions and benefits that the cloud provides. They need to see use cases and solutions that directly address their business needs if they are ever going to adopt it. For example, hosted application services probably wouldn't help them, but offering them a hosted billing and invoicing solution integrated with their purchasing system might grab their attention.

Small-business owners think in terms of what solves their problems (as we all should), and cloud providers like RackSpace will have to evolve towards offering specific solutions if they want to capture the small-business market.

(Cloud rack photo by Maximillian Dornseif.)

Disclosure: Rackspace is a RWW sponsor.

In November 2007, we listed and reviewed 10 promising Semantic Web apps. A lot can happen in one year on the Internet, so we thought we'd check back in with each of the 10 products and see how they're progressing. <script type="text/javascript">digg_url = 'http://digg.com/software/10_Semantic_Apps_to_Watch_One_Year_Later';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';</script><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script>What's changed over the past year and what are these companies working on now? The products are, in no particular order: Freebase, Powerset, Twine, AdaptiveBlue, Hakia, Talis, TrueKnowledge, TripIt, Calais (was ClearForest), Spock.

In our next post in this series, we're going to publish a completely new list of Semantic apps to watch! That's right, 10 more Semantic apps. Let us know your suggestions in the comments.

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Freebase is an open, semantically marked up database of information. It looks similar to Wikipedia, but Freebase is all about structured data and what you can do with it.

Freebase has been one of the more hyped companies in Semantic Web, leading to some skepticism that the product is too much like Wikipedia and offers nothing much new. In May '08, we attempted to dispel the Freebase skepticism. Our conclusion was that the structured database, API, creative commons licensing - among other things - all added up to a richer product than Wikipedia. Then in July, we reported that Freebase was about to hit 4 million topics in its collection - which at the time was 60% more than the English Wikipedia.

However, we noted some concerns with Freebase - "big gaps in the data" along with usability issues. In a follow-up article in August, we covered an interesting tool for browsing Freebase, called Freebase Parallax. Unfortunately, when we tried out a number of searches in Parallax, very few subjects were well populated.

RWW verdict one year later: still lots of work to do for Freebase, in terms of usability and useful data.

When we did our round-up one year ago, ClearForest had been recently acquired by Reuters and at that point it had a Web Service and a Firefox extension. What a change a year brings! ClearForest went on to release Calais, a toolkit of products that enable users to incorporate semantic functionality within their blog, content management system, website or application.

Since launching the Open Calais API early this year, over 6,000 developers have registered with it and the service is doing more than 1 million transactions a day. We wrote about the launch of Calais' easiest-to-use service yet, called SemanticProxy, at the end of September. Version 3.0 was released earlier this month and version 4 is expected by January 09.

RWW verdict one year later: Calais has really blossomed over the past year and it is one of the most promising Semantic services around today. We can't wait to see what's next!

Powerset (see our initial coverage here and here) is a natural language search engine. It's fair to say that Powerset has had a great 2008, having been acquired by Microsoft in July this year.

At the time of the acquisition, Powerset said that it needed a bigger partner to expand its product beyond its current state of only searching Wikipedia - something we had speculated about when the rumors of the acquisition first appeared. In its own statement, Microsoft stressed how useful Powerset's technology will be for improving Microsoft's own search products and to "take Search to the next level." In our analysis of the deal, we noted that it was a "bold play requiring exact execution" by Microsoft. We thought it was doubtful that Microsoft bought the company just to enhance Live Search - although in September Microsoft did just that. Possibly the plan is to replicate the Wikipedia solution, then incorporate Powerset into Internet Explorer.

RWW verdict one year later: successful acquisition for Powerset, bold one for the acquirer Microsoft. Can't wait to see what Microsoft does with it!

Definitely one of the more controversial of the Semantic apps we've covered on ReadWriteWeb. At launch last year, Twine claimed to be the first mainstream Semantic Web app. The company's founder Nova Spivack hasn't been shy to talk the product up even more over the past year. Version 1.0 of Twine was launched late October. At that time Spivack told us that Twine had 500,000 unique visitors in its closed beta, of which 50,000 are currently "active" (a user who visits the Twine site at least once per month). There were 20,000 'twines' at that point, with 1 million pieces of content having been added to the system.

Those statistics are OK for a relatively young beta, however Twine has also been beset by usability and performance issues in its beta period. In March we summed it up with a post entitled: Twine Disappoints After Semantic Web Hype.

RWW verdict one year later: still far from mainstream and reviews have been disappointing user experience has been an issue over the past year. Struggling to find its niche.

Update: Some people have pointed out in comments and via email that many reviews of Twine have been positive. We agree and so we've struck out that line and clarified our position - that user experience has been the main issue.

Hakia is a search engine focusing on natural language processing methods to try and deliver 'meaningful' search results. Hakia attempts to analyze the concept of a search query, in particular by doing sentence analysis. Over the past year Hakia has been busy extending its reach - licensing its proprietary OntoSem technology to other companies in March and announcing a Semantic API in June. It also released a social network of sorts, called h-Club.

RWW verdict one year later: Hakia has made good progress getting its technology into the hands of third parties. It's a steep challenge taking on Google though.

Tripit is an app that manages your travel planning. With TripIt, you forward incoming bookings to plans@tripit.com and the system manages the rest.

Over the past year TripIt has continued to iterate on its feature set - introducing LinkedIn integration, better mobile functionality, more social networking features, and other goodies.

RWW verdict one year later: TripIt is one of those apps that amazes people when they first use it. Its challenge now is to grab a foothold among mainstream users.

Disclosure: AdaptiveBlue is a current RWW sponsor and its founder Alex Iskold is a feature writer at RWW.

AdaptiveBlue are makers of the Firefox plugin, BlueOrganizer. As we wrote in January this year, the basic idea behind BlueOrganizer is that it gives you added information about webpages you visit and offers useful links based on the subject matter.

Over the past year the company has been working on a new product, called Glue. Launched last month, Glue is a more social networking oriented version of BlueOrganizer - it connects you to your friends based around things like books, music, movies, stars, artists, stocks, wine, restaurants, and more.

RWW verdict one year later: the company has diversified smartly, but its challenge is to go beyond the 'cool factor' and get more people using the products repeatedly.

When we covered UK semantic search engine TrueKnowledge last year, it was just after it had unveiled a demo of its private beta. Back then it reminded us of the also unlaunched (at that time) Powerset, but it was also reminiscent of Ask.com "smart answers". TrueKnowledge combines natural language analysis, an internal knowledge base and external databases to offer immediate answers to various questions.

One year later, TrueKnowledge is still in private beta - and this author got an error message when I submitted my email to apply to get into the beta. However there are signs of public life in the company blog, which is fairly active. Also the company launched a beta app this month, called Quiz Bot - a natural language search service that likely "won't be able to answer your question, but by asking us you are helping improve the service."

RWW verdict one year later: The jury is still out. It looks like a public beta is still some way off, which puts pressure on it to be extremely good when it eventually does launch.

Talis is a 40-year old UK software company which has created a semantic web application platform. Over the past year, Talis has continued to make a name for itself as an evangelist for the Semantic Web, most notably through the blogging and podcasting activities of Paul Miller. Talis also produces a great magazine for Semantic Web, called Nodalities, and has an active company blog under the same name. As for the company's products, the platform seems to be iterating nicely and is being used in niche library and government applications.

RWW verdict one year later: Talis has successfully positioned itself as an authority on Semantic Web in the blogosphere, which we love because it's a great way to keep track of Semantic Web trends!

Spock is a people search engine that got a lot of buzz when it launched. Alex Iskold went so far as to call it "one of the best vertical semantic search engines built so far."

So how has it fared over the past year? Apparently its traffic has been very good. However, as Sarah Perez recently wrote on this blog, the "excitement has worn off." Instead of searching for people on Spock or other similar people search engines, wrote Sarah, most users simply turn to old standbys like Facebook or LinkedIn. To get their mojo back again (and no doubt some money in the bank), Spock has plans to launch a new subscriber-only service in January. It will be full-on public record search tool, which people can subscribe to for $1.99 per month.

RWW verdict one year later: despite claims of great traffic growth, it's clear that Spock as a consumer search engine hasn't quite panned out. Can it re-invent itself as a subscription-based specialist service? Check back in another year.

We're pleased to see that all 10 of the products we profiled one year ago are still very much alive and kicking. One had a great acquisition result (Powerset), at least one has grown into a thriving developer ecosystem (Calais), some are experimenting with new services (AdaptiveBlue, Spock, Hakia), some are continuing to pump out new features and/or apps (TripIt, Talis). However, it's also clear that some are still trying to find their feet (Freebase, Twine, TrueKnowledge).

In our next post in this series, we'll profile 10 more Semantic Apps to watch! Please tell us in the comments which ones have caught your eye recently.

Tough economic times and startups have at least one thing in common - you need character and determination to survive. Character is what it takes to win, to believe and to persuade others. It's a mix of passion, determination, sleepless hours, hard work. Character is about crossing the finish line, about achieving dreams and goals.

While there are inborn traits that help to develop character, often character comes from inspiration. Ask any enterprenuer about who set the bar for them and you will hear the name of another enterprenuer, a historical figure, a writer, even a fictional character. So in this post, we look at five very different books that share a common theme - remarkable people. Reading them, you will be inspired to strive for perfection, to innovate, to cross the finish line, to fight hard for your idea and for your business.

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There's probably no one in the tech industry who doesn't know or admire Steve Jobs. Tireless innovator and one of the fathers of computer technology, Steve has had a hand in many modern marvels. His first famous 'child' was Macintosh, and the latest is iPhone. Steve also revolutionized the music industry by taking music online, and helped push computer animation by funding Pixar.

How has he done it? By being relentless, passionate and focused. Steve in the early days was reputed to be impossible to work with. Yet, he is widely admired and recognized as a great leader. The bottom line is that Steve gets the job done.

Kahney's book, which Richard recently reviewed here, is a compact edition that gives insight into Steve's character. You will learn how Steve utilizes creativity, focus, and at times the stick, to drive Apple's team to build amazing products.

Haruki Murakami is one of the best modern Japanese writers. His books are creative and unique, his writing is an inspiration. Murakami, not only a gifted writer, is also a remarkable character. In this book he describes his journey as a runner. At age 30 he quit smoking and started running.

Training tirelessly he readied himself for his first marathon. He flew to Athens and, retracing the original route, ran to the town of Marathon.

Since then, Murakami has competed in at least one marathon and triathlon a year. He trains with the same discipline with which he iterates to perfect his writing. This short book reveals simple yet powerful truths. Reading these pages, Murakami emerges as an incredible force of focus and will.

To learn more, read our companion post: What Startups Can Learn From Haruki Murakami.

Lance Armstrong is one of the most impressive athletes in modern sport. The stamina and character needed to win the Tour De France are impressive, but Lance's most impressive race was not on the bike. Shortly after winning his first world championship at age 25 Lance confronted testicular cancer. He fought it for a year and won. This book focuses on this fight and connects the dots in his life.

Written in a simple yet profound way, the book inspires on every page. Armstrong reveals that cancer made him a different, better person. It reshaped his character from boyish, feisty, more physical rider to a wiser, patient and more tactical cyclist. Ultimately he argues that if it wasn't for cancer he could never have become great.

The book relates an inspiring journey, the crux of which is: never quit and never back down.

Today IBM might not be the most inspirational company around, but its story is full of innovation and character. IBM owes its status to the pair of Thomas J. Watson, Snr and Jnr, two different men passionate about business and computing. The book is a biography of IBM from its inception as CTR (Computing Tabulating Recording) Company to the defining player in modern computing.

Watson Snr's style was a mix of carrot and stick. He demanded a lot from employees and focused on corporate culture. He planted roots of growth and scale that were leveraged by his son, Thomas J. Watson Jnr, who succeeded his father as CEO. Watson Jnr took the company to the next level, pushing it into the mainframe business.

The father and son blend in a single narrative and what emerges is IBM's character of strength, passion, focus and success. Even though the skills that created IBM differ from those needed to build a successful startup, the book is a great read for every enterprenuer.

All five books on our list are full of strong characters, but the Pixar team had to endure plenty to realise their computer animation dream. For two decades the team had to work odd tangential jobs to stay alive. Remarkably the group stayed together and survived thanks to Steve Jobs, who bought Pixar for $5M from Lucas Digital and (reluctantly) kept the company going through the years until its triumphant launch of Toy Story and the later multi-billion dollar exit to Disney.

What help the Pixar team win was an obsession to make computer animation happen. Even while Disney and Lucas Digital were dismissing the promise of making movies using computer graphics, the team stuck together. They continued to build and enhance their software and algorithms, ultimately leading to a set of solutions that enabled hits like Toy Story, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. The Pixar story is an inspirational lesson on how enterpreneurs can succeed in business and life.

And now tell us about people and books that have inspired you and helped build your character.

Top image: Daniel Y. Go

This week Barack Obama won the Democrat nomination for US President, pitting him against Republican candidate John McCain. At the same time both candidates have ramped up their web efforts, with Obama's camp calling for web developers to "Write Software, Change Washington" and McCain's camp launching a new-look website. In this post we check out the latest web developments in the race to become the next US President.

The Obama campaign is currently looking for "exceptionally talented web developers" to take their web presence to the next level. The job requirements show that we can expect some rapid innovation in using the Web to win an election:

"This six-month opportunity will allow you to:

• Create software tools which will enable an unprecedented nationwide voter contact and mobilization effort
• Help build and run the largest online, grassroots fundraising operation in the history of American politics
• Introduce cutting-edge social networking and online organizing to the democratic process by empowering everyday people to participate on My.BarackObama"

Meanwhile John McCain's campaign has beefed up its own web presence. The Huffington Post recently reported that McCain's new website is now very similar to Obama's. The HuffPost's Sam Stein noted McCain's new "Obama-like slogan, and an image that seems uncannily similar to Obama's trademark campaign logo".

The Vanity Fair blog did a good analysis of the two websites. According to web entrepreneur and design expert Doug Jaeger, Obama has "the best design, in terms of typography, color, and website architecture." He also notes that "Obama has by far the most links under what he calls "Obama Everywhere." Links to Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Blackplanet, FaithBase, Digg, Twitter--he's doing it all. He's more Web 2.0 than some of the people I hang out with."

Barack Obama's official website

I agree that Obama's website is a tour de force of web magic, with seemingly every social networking base covered. I was also impressed at how the first page you're confronted with on Obama's site is a donation form! It's not done in an 'in your face' style either, there is a 'skip this page' link very clearly marked at the top of the page if you don't wish to donate.

McCain's new site is impressive too. Donations, calls to get involved, and social networking are features to the fore, and overall it is a clean and usable design. It does indeed seem to take inspiration from Obama's site, down to the "A leader we can believe in" motto!

John McCain's official website

In truth, both are great websites and packed full of useful features and excellent integration with 'real world' efforts - such as getting donations and spreading the word about their respective candidates.

Further ReadWriteWeb coverage of the US election relating to web tech:

• Is That Barack Obama in Your FriendFeed?
• Oh Boy Obama: User Generated Campaign Think Tank
• Another Way to Measure Electoral Clout: Watch the Widgets
• Web 2.0 Tools Favor Democrats
• The Birth of the Political Long Tail

Back in March, we said Adobe was slowly building an online empire. Today, that news turns out to be true. Adobe is has just launched their version of an online office suite available at Acrobat.com, complete with word processor (Buzzword), web conferencing/whiteboard app (ConnectNow), online file sharing (Share), file storage, (My Files), and PDF converter. To complement this launch, Adobe has also announced a brand-new version of Adobe Acrobat, Acrobat 9, the biggest release since the initial one that introduced Acrobat to the world. The remarkable change in this new version is that Adobe is now incorporating Flash into the PDF experience.

Acrobat.com is the new entry point to Adobe's suite of online services. Available now as a public beta, from here you can utilize the Adobe web office tools all from one cohesive and integrated suite that allows for anywhere access and online collaboration. At Acrobat.com, you have access to the following web office tools: Buzzword, ConnectNow, Share, My Files, and Create PDF.

Buzzword

Buzzword (our coverage) is the Adobe version of the word processor. Like all of Adobe's online tools, Buzzword is sleek and elegant. Instead of simply trying to port desktop software to the web, Adobe's vision seems to be more focused on creating something fresh, built specifically for the web with online collaboration in mind. In lieu of AJAX, Adobe's tools utilize Flash/Flex to provide the beautiful UI and a true WYSIWYG experience. Whether your Buzzword document is on a large screen or small screen or on a printed page, what you see on the screen - fonts, letter spacing, colors, and graphics - are all reproduced perfectly.

Buzzword also stands out for the way they've implemented online collaboration - instead of names in sidebar like in Google Docs for example, the complete list of a file's collaborators are always displayed prominently at the bottom of a document along with their current status - reading, editing, etc. - as well as the date and time of the last version they viewed.

Collaborators can be given roles like editor, reviewer, co-author, and reader and depending on those access levels, they can either write, edit, or comment in the file. The comments are highly visible and color-coded by user which makes it easy to see what's being said and by who.

The different versions of a document are also easily accessible from the bottom of the screen. You can slide your mouse along a timeline whose dots which indicate the different versions, gliding smoothly from one version to the next.

Buzzword

Connect Now

Another piece of Adobe's office suite is ConnectNow, an online whiteboarding and web conferencing tool. ConnectNow allows for live meetings over the web and offers screen sharing, chat, whiteboards, VoIP, and video conferencing. Like the other products, ConnectNow doesn't clutter the screen with the many features is offers, yet the intuitive layout makes them somehow seem to be never far from reach.

Participants can be assigned roles which can be changed at any time during the meeting. These roles provide for their ability to share their screens with other members and make notes. Since audio is integrated in the app, companies can save money that would have been previously spent on teleconferencing bills. However, if traditional teleconferencing is preferred, Adobe provide numbers via Vapps voice conferencing service - you would just pay the long distance charges.

The only drawback to ConnectNow is its limitations in terms of number of people. Currently, only three people can use the service simultaneously, which limits its ability to offer a true alternative to a business's current web conferencing solution.

ConnectNow

Share

Adobe Share is a tool that allows you to share files with others. Instead of emailing large files, you can share your file from this app and still maintain control of the document. You approve the recipient list and what access they have to the file. A document previewer built into Acrobat.com also lets you launch and view PDF and image files right in your browser instead of having to launch the original application.

Although Share has been available since fall of 2007, now that it's more visible as part of this office suite, its ability to allow document embedding will compete more directly with Scribd.com. Like Scribd, Share embeds aren't limited to one particular type of file, but support many major formats, even video.

Share

My Files

My Files is a document organizer and storage space whose UI helps you locate documents quickly. You can browse by author, file type, alphabetical order, date created, last updated, or a combination of multiple filters. With 5 GB available for use, you have space enough to store a healthy collection of files.

My Files

Create PDF

From Acrobat.com, you have access to a free online PDF converter tool which lets you create PDFs from your existing files. However, this tool is meant to be more of a "wet your whistle" offering, designed to pull you into purchasing the full version of Adobe Acrobat 9. With Create PDF, you are limited to only 5 conversions per user.

What makes this online office suite even better is that Adobe is also making it available via an AIR application. The app comes bundled with the new version of Adobe Reader and lets you work with your Acrobat.com files outside of a web browser. Unfortunately, the application as of now requires you to be online, despite AIR's support for offline sync. However, offline access is on the product roadmap in the future.

Adobe's newest version of Acrobat has also been announced today, although the actual product won't be available until sometime in July. Designed to maximize Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia, Acrobat now includes native support for Flash.

Although there were ways before to integrate a QuickTime or Windows Media file into a PDF, it was not native nor a seamless experience to do so. Now, in Acrobat 9, inserting a Flash file is as simple as choosing a file from the "Insert" menu.

Adding Flash Content

Also in Acrobat 9 is the new concept of PDF Portfolios. Within these portfolios, you can combine multiple media types - like documents, audio, video, even 3D objects - and compress them into one PDF file. Thanks to the Flash integration, these files can be easily branded using built-in professional templates and options that allow you to add custom navigation and choose from a variety of layers, colors, themes and more.

For those working in teams, Acrobat 9 includes capabilities for real-time collaboration right within a PDF file and enabled via Acrobat.com. In order to use this capability, a collaborator will either need Acrobat 9 or will need to commence the sharing via Acrobat.com. Recipients will also need version 9 of either Acrobat or the free reader.

Once sharing has begun, collaborators can work together in real time and control of the screen can be easily passed back and forth. As one person scrolls to a new page or zooms in, the information is immediately updated on the other collaborator's screen. And because the only information being passed is a series of actions and not a screen scrape, impact to a network's available bandwidth is minimal.

For professional users of the paid version of Adobe Acrobat, there are varying levels of features available in the Standard and Professional allowing for the ability to create, convert, track, and protect PDFs, among many other things. However, all versions are enabled to work with Acrobat.com and, despite all these new features, the latest version of Acrobat launches in half the time as Acrobat 8.

For now the suite of services at Acrobat.com is free and it will remain free for personal use, but there are plans to offer a business-friendly paid version in the future which would allow for administrative access and control as well as support.

What's unknown is to what extent a professional, paid version will uncap some of the current limits on the tools (5 GB of storage, 3 users in web conferencing). It would certainly make sense to do so, but at this time we don't know anything about pricing or what the new levels would be.

Also noticeably missing from this version of the Adobe online office suite is any sort of spreadsheet or slideshow creation tool. However, Adobe confirmed that both of these are planned for the future, as is offline access via AIR.

There's still a chance to see more integration with other Adobe products in the future, too. In March, we confirmed that Adobe foresees Photoshop Express integration with Buzzword was a real possibility, for example. When these changes and additions are to take place though is anyone's guess.

What is clear is that Adobe hasn't been sitting idly by watching as services move to the cloud. This launch of a hosted suites of services, not to mention this huge shift with Acrobat 9, now a web-powered tool, shows the company's focus on combining the best of web office tools with their current set of products.

Even with all these new, integrated products and services, you still get the sense that these are all tools meant to enhance the Acrobat experience as opposed to an attempt to compete with traditional business software like Microsoft Office. If anything, their word processor seems like more of a way to begin the task of PDF creation - especially with the service's handy "convert to PDF feature" - than it is an attempt to be a Microsoft Word competitor.

Google should take note of Adobe's use the web to maximize their core products. Instead of providing seamless integration amongst their web offerings (mail, calendaring, docs, etc), Google seems more caught up trying to build a simplified "Microsoft Office killer" in the cloud, and luring people into using it for its collaboration aspects. With every new announcement, the focus for Google has been on playing either a game of feature-by-feature matching or one-upping Microsoft instead of trying to solidify a brand experience for a collaborative suite of products. For users who don't go the "docs for your domain" route, there's definitely a sense that the Google tools are very separate products, and even those "business" users only see minor integration between each service. Even basic tasks, like making an email an calendar appointment, for example, are currently beyond Google's reach.

Also Microsoft's attempt to move to the cloud with Office Live Workspace doesn't come nearly as close in terms of focus and direction as this new Adobe service does, even with Office's new built-in functionality to open and save files to and from that web-based service. Instead, it almost seems a holdover product until Live Mesh is unleashed on the world. Adobe, on the other hand uses their entire platform -  PDFs, Flash, Flex, AIR - to provide a cohesive brand experience that focuses your attention on upgrading to their paid software - a wise business move for them. And like both Google and Microsoft, Adobe can capitalize on name recognition and a large userbase to migrate people to web computing - an obstacle that lesser-known suites (at least outside the tech bubble) like Zoho and ThinkFree still must overcome. Adobe is now certainly one to watch - it will be interesting to see what comes next as Acrobat.com grows to become a business tool that companies would consider paying for.

I just found a more useful way to search than Google. (Sort of.) It only works for a defined use case, but, in a search market that is 85% going on 90% Google-dominated, this can still be significant. The site that provides a better search experience than Google? Business social network LinkedIn. Long time readers of this blog know that I have already chronicled my success at using LinkedIn for both business development and recruiting. So it is not a surprise to me that LinkedIn is seeing easily the highest growth rate among social networking sites.

LinkedIn's 361% year-over-year growth handily beats Facebook's 56% growth in the same period, according to the latest stats from Nielsen:

However many people have pointed out to me that my case is unusual. I have been in business for 30 years and have worked across many markets, in many countries and I have worked the LinkedIn system to get those contacts usable. This puts me in the early adopter end for people of my age, which means that more people like me are likely to use LinkedIn more aggressively in the future. That fits the original mission of LinkedIn, which is to enable people to rebuild their relationship networks built up over years in business. That has been totally successful in my case. I have re-connected with people that I worked with over 20 years ago who are now senior people in specialist areas and I have found those connections valuable in my work.

However, LinkedIn is less useful to somebody without a deep network. For example, somebody just entering the workforce. Somebody who has probably had a great time at college using Facebook and finds the features on LinkedIn to be relatively primitive and well, kind of boring. And not that useful either, because while they can see who the right contacts are they are no more reachable than they are in ZoomInfo or any other public directory. Just because I have the name, address and email for Michael Moritz at Sequoia Capital does not mean that he will return my email/call. And having a way to spam him via InMail does not really help. Actually Michael Moritz and I attended the same college at the same time and he still won't return my email via LinkedIn. Probably, he knows that we did not actually meet at college and I probably want to pitch him on an investment. (Really, Mr. Moritz, I don't have a pitch for you... well not now at any rate.)

So even if I pay to upgrade to LinkedIn Business for $20 per month for the privilege of spamming (sorry, sending InMail) 3 people I don't know every month, it won't be much more useful than renting a list from a good old-fashioned arms dealer to the spam industry (aka the list rental industry, sometimes called Database Marketing). I have not upgraded and don't intend to on those terms. Herein lies a possible flaw in LinkedIn's business model - the people who will pay are the people without networks who need to sell to those who have networks, which may end up disappointing both parties.

Which is why my recent use of LinkedIn was so significant. It did not require my existing network to get results. I used the Questions & Answers feature to get answers to two real world questions. Both involved finding a specialist type of service provider that I needed in a hurry. I got the answer and I have hooked up with enough specialist vendors to get the job completed. Those vendors are now in my network. Done.

Before using LinkedIn, I tried Google. This eventually got me to some sites that maintained directories of these vendors, but it was still a lengthy process from there to get to a short-list. In one case my Google search got me to Yelp, where there was a rating for one of those vendors, but there was only 1 vendor in that category, so the rating wasn't useful.

Using LinkedIn, within 24 hours, I got recommendations on more than one vendor that were precise and ended up being very useful in finding a good fit.

The next day, by accident, I discovered a problem, though I think this problem is fixable by LinkedIn. The day after doing this search, I was talking to a friend about an entirely unrelated matter. He asked me if I had found that vendor that I was looking for. He was just making conversation, but I was concerned. "Did you get an email from me on this?" I asked him. It turns out that Questions send InMails (emails within LinkedIn) to all my contacts. I had no intention of spamming all my contacts to help with my fairly simple search. Sorry. Really. The form on LinkedIn specifically asks me if I want to restrict the Question to my contacts. I did not. I assumed that I needed to trawl wider than that. However I assumed (incorrectly it seems) that my contacts would not be sent InMails.

That is easily fixable by LinkedIn. They will have to fix this or risk really turning off their core community and fall into the, "oh, no, another annoying spammy tool" category. I am confident that LinkedIn is alert to this danger and will fix it.

What I assumed happens is that people with expertise in the area that I was interested in register on the site as willing to look at Questions relating to my area of interest. I am fully aware that this is self-selecting and will get me people with a commercial motivation to provide an Answer. Thats OK, I was not born yesterday, don't believe in Santa Claus and don't believe everything I read online or in print. Questioning every source is an ingrained and essential habit for most people. It still got me a useful short-list quicker than any other source. I did not need to perform lengthy searches on Google for a specialist directory or forum.

LinkedIn clearly needs to develop this feature more. Apart from preventing the spamming of my contacts, I expect them to refine the selection of experts. This is already self-selecting. When you send a Question, you select from categories and sub categories from a taxonomy that is quite intuitive for business people. I selected Hiring and Human Resources and then from that I selected Staffing and Recruiting. That means my Question only went to people who claim expertise in Staffing and Recruiting, which is like an uber-forum capability. I don't need to find a forum to find an expert, I just send a Question and the expert finds me. I can envisage LinkedIn refining the taxonomy further to get more fine-grained areas of expertise as the network grows. They will have to remain alert to commercial manipulation as vendors get more savvy about using this, but there are now fairly well established ways to do that and LinkedIn is a controlled environment, so they can lock out an offender. The Internet, on the other hand, cannot lock somebody from sending emails, despite valiant efforts by the spam cops, and LinkedIn seem quite vigilant to this danger.

I am not sure if this works as well in Facebook. In LinkedIn, business people work to a defined taxonomy that is well accepted. In Facebook it is way more free-form and that is probably a lot more fun. But if Web 3.0, aka the Semantic Web, is "the combination of mass collaboration and structured databases" (my definition) then I may have just seen the early signs of Web 3.0 in action. And it helped me to Get The Job Done.

Digg is in big trouble. We already know that Yahoo! Buzz, a beta social news service by Yahoo!, can drive a large amount of traffic and comments to websites. We also know the ongoing problems at competitor digg, which continue to be skated around by digg management. Now we have proof that Yahoo! Buzz is kicking some digg behind in terms of stats. According to a new report from comScore, in April Yahoo! Buzz for the first time did more traffic than digg - Buzz got nearly 7 million U.S. unique visitors in April, a 74% growth over March. What's more, about 51% of Yahoo! Buzz users are women, compared to just 39% women for digg. We have graphs below from comScore...

The following graph shows that, for the first time, Buzz has overtaken digg in unique visitors per month. It is also trending sharply upwards, while digg is flat at best; and has been since October 2007.

The below graph shows minutes spent on site. Once again it's sorry reading for digg, which is trending downwards while Buzz goes up.

Finally, here are charts showing that Buzz is almost identical to the mainstream men/women Internet split, while digg users are 61% men.

"The Internet is recession proof," is a sentiment we've heard trumpeted over and over and over again the past year. However, guest author Llew Claasen argued on this blog in February that paid search ads specifically are actually not recession proof, and a new report out today appears to confirm that a broad economic slowdown in the United States is starting to negatively effect the online ad industry.

The argument that online ads will generally fair well in a recession usually goes something like this: online advertising cheaper than traditional print and television advertising and offers far more accurate ROI measurement, so when budgets are squeezed, Internet advertising will look more attractive. "The thing we could well see is, a recession could expedite the shift from traditional spending to digital spending," said Jeremy Wright, global director of mobile brand strategy at Nokia Interactive, at Ad:Tech last month.

But a new report from PubMatic appears to indicate otherwise. Their May AdPrice Index, which was prepared by independent statisticians Dr. Albert Madansky and Dr. Michele Madansky, indicates that ad prices are starting to drop.

The report found that ad prices (based on effective CPMs) in April across all sites fell an average of 23%. This was most acutely felt by large sites (over 100 million page views per month), led by social networking sites, which saw eCPMs plummet 47% from March to April. Medium-sized web site monetization was essentially flat, while small sites (less than 1 million page views per month) saw modest gains month-over-month.

Social networking eCPMs sit at 19 cents, according to the AdPrice Index report, below January lows of 22 cents. The technology sector was basically flat from month-to-month, but still well off beginning of the year highs.

This all could indicate that a general US economic downturn is starting to be felt on the web. While the study didn't look specifically at search ads -- which analysts have said would be the last to feel the pain of a recession -- and it didn't differentiate between display and text ads, or between eCPMs from ad network to ad network, it is a general indicator of a slow down in the online ad market. Granted, this is only a couple of months of data, so it would be hard to create concrete trend predictions from it.

PubMatic's AdPrice Index is made up of over 3,000 web sites, about 85% of which are based in the US.

It's a pretty good bet that if you're not making a Twitter or Facebook application, you're probably making a lifestreaming application. Okay, so not everyone is into lifestreaming, but it is one of the hottest areas for development out there, and there are an overwhelming amount of services offering a way to aggregate all the little bits of your online life (which, for the purpose of this post, is the definition of lifestreaming that we'll use). Richard MacManus wrote an excellent primer on lifestreaming in January, but we touched on just 5 such services. The purpose of this post, rather than to review, is to just list the various options out there.

Lifestreaming apps generally fall into two categories: those that help you keep track of and display your own lifestream and those that help you keep track of your friend's lifestreams (or both). For the sake of clarity, we've focused mainly on the former for this list.

• Tumblr - Tumblr is a microblogging application that also allows the inclusion of activity streams from other services.
• Onaswarm - Onaswarm, which is in private beta, is a dedicated lifestreaming app that supports a wide variety of other services.
• Jaiku - The chief function of Jaiku, as a presence app similar to Twitter, is enhanced by letting users aggregate activity from outside services.
• Lifestrea.ms - Lifestrea.ms -- in closed beta -- is a dedicated activity stream aggregator that quotes our review in the company line by calling itself a "standards based nerve center."
• Soup.io - Similar to Tumblr, Soup.io is a microblogging application. It also supports outside status updates for 11 services and any RSS feed.
• FriendFeed - Due to being founded by a bunch of ex-Googlers, FriendFeed might hold the crown for most talked about lifestreaming app. It supports nearly 30 web sites.
• MyBlogLog - MyBlogLog, which specializes in creating ad-hoc social networks around blogs, just got into lifestreaming with an update last night.
• Profilactic - Profilactic supports 135 sites. Yes, 135 sites. As well as the ability to add your own. Have fun.
• iStalkr - iStalkr is a hub for your social media activity and that of your friends and family, with a unique approach to lifestreaming that puts your life on a timeline.
• Correlate.us - Correlate.us creates a river of activity for a handful of supported sites, and graphs which sites you use the most, all with the design sensibilities of del.icio.us.
• ProfileFly - Focused on social networks, ProfileFly creates a replacement profile that mashes up status updates from your existing social profiles.
• Second Brain - Second Brain takes takes a slightly less automatic approach to life streaming by asking that you categorize and group your activity into collections. See our review.
• Explode.us - Explode.us is a social media search engine that also offers "a profile to consolidate your various online presences."
• liveZuu - A lifestreaming application that supports 28 networks and offer a Facebook app.
• OneSwhirl - A newer dedicated lifestream aggregator that celebrated its first public release today.
• Socialthing! - Currently in closed beta, Socialthing! is a promising lifestreaming service that offers a nifty-looking iPhone optimized version. They're planning to release the service at SXSW.
• iminta - iminta keeps you up-to-date on what your friends are "in to" and lets you share your own activity stream.
• Plaxo Pulse - Most famous for helping to get Robert Scoble temporarily banned from Facebook, Plaxo's Pulse product lets you aggregate activity from a wide variety of third party services.
• Identoo - A fairly standard social streaming site.
• Escaloop - Escaloop is a free-form lifestreaming app that lets you combine up to 20 RSS feeds into a single stream (yeah, there are other RSS mixers out there, but Escaloop is notable on this list for specifically targeting lifestreaming).
• Hictu - Hictu is a video microblogging app that supports importing activity streams from outside services.
• Life2Front - Life2Front's LiFE-Line activity stream feature is a functional activity stream aggregator, if not the most attractive.
• 30Boxes - The online calendar app also has lifestreaming capabilities.
• Readr - Readr mashes 21 different sites into a single profile feed.
• Suprglu - Suprglu pulls content from the web services you use and then republishes them in blog format.
• Where is me? - A lifestreaming app that pulls from 11 services or RSS feeds.
• Slifeshare - Lifestreaming via a Mac OS X application (Windows promised soon).
• MovableType ActionStreams - For do-it-yourselfers, MovableType offers a lifestreaming plugin for their blog platform.
• SimpleLife - More for the DIY set, SimpleLife is a lifestreaming plugin for Wordpress.
• WP Lifestream - Another lifestreaming plugin for Wordpress.
• RSS Stream - You guessed it, a third lifestream plugin for Wordpress.
• oneConnect - Yahoo!'s oneConnect mobile service includes activity stream aggregation features.
• Facebook (?) - Rumor has it that Facebook will be opening up the news feed to outside service updates.
• Socialstream - Nothing has come out of it yet, but this Google funded academic project at Carnegie Mellon University into lifestreaming has garnered a ton of press attention.
• Jeremy Keith's Lifestreaming Script - Jeremy Keith's lifestreaming script was one of the first and inspired some of the services on this list.

Are there any we missed? Which is your favorite? Let us know in the comments below.

Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks did an analysis of current frontpage stories on digg, the popular social news site that started out as a tech competitor to Slashdot. Allen noted that now just 15% of frontpage stories are technology ones, which is a huge change from its roots. Slashdot meanwhile continues to focus exclusively on ultra-geeky topics.

I can add my own bit of analysis to Allen's. At the end of last week I did a check of which tech publishers were getting the most frontpages.

The data showed one interesting trend: digg tech stories are dominated by a few select blogs. Here is what I discovered:

Number of digg frontpages in last 30 days:
Ars Technica = 87
Gizmodo = 84
Engadget = 67
Torrentfreak = 36
Techcrunch = 12
Valleywag = 9
ReadWriteWeb = 6
Mashable = 4
Gigaom = 4
VentureBeat = 2
CenterNetworks = 1

As you can see, Ars Technica, Gizmodo and Engadget get far more frontpages than other top tech blogs like Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb and Allen's own CenterNetworks. Ars gets on average 3 frontpages a day - in other words, they get as many frontpages in 2 days as we get in a month. Yet on Technorati's list of top blogs, only 7 places separates Ars (#7) from RWW (#14). I'm not complaining (much), it's just the way this business works. But it is interesting that digg, which is a social news site and famously runs without using editors, is dominated by such a small collection of top blogs. And that select group appears to be getting smaller and more exclusive by the day.

Don't get me wrong, Slashdot has its own biases - it almost always chooses to link to stories from a traditional 'old media' source, rather than blogs. So it too no doubt has a small collection of sources that dominate its frontpage.

My point (other than indulging myself in 'shop talk') is that at the same time that Digg is becoming more mainstream, the variety of its sources for top news has dropped. Is this a good thing? Obviously not for some of us tech blogs. But I'd argue it's also not good for digg readers, who are not getting the diversity of tech stories they used to get.