Planet Broadband Mechanics

I found this interesting: "Japan's online social scene isn't so social" (AP). I'm no expert, but from what I've seen from my partner and her family, this is totally believable -- Japanese *really* value their privacy. I'm forever hearing scary Japanese news stories that can't be helping -- kids being bullied at school because of something their mother said on her blog, people being murdered by people they've just met or who live nearby.

Comment

When Kennedy and Nixon debated for the Presidency in 1960, 70 million people watched the first Presidential debate ever broadcast live on TV.

And not a single viewer could post a comment.

These days things are different. Tonight far fewer people probably watched the Current.tv and Twitter collaborative broadcast of Obain v. McCain. Scores of them participated with 140 character quips in real time, though. It worked very well, Current did a great job; you can get some idea from the 1 minute of video embedded below.

The commentary from viewers was some times pointless and at other times impressively insightful. It was democratic - or at least as democratic as live streaming online video, a Twitter account and being in-the-know can be.

Was it on par with the first live televised Presidential debate? It may not have been, but we're less able to be awestruck today than we were in 1960. John McCain, incidentally, was 24 years old and just out of flight school at the time. He must have felt the impact of TV full force. Obama, incidentally, was conceived a month later.

Is live online video plus viewer input a real game changer in the Presidential debate viewer experience?
( polls)While many websites streamed live video, the Current/Twitter broadcast certainly wasn't watched by as many people as the first televised Presidential debate. But new these new media are expected to ripple out over the world just as far at television has.

Was tonight's live online video plus Twitter coverage of the debates a meaningful game changer? Participate in our poll to share your opinion.

The technology worked well. Tweets were repeated and browsers had to be refreshed (Kulabyte, the most effective live streaming service we've seen yet, apparently was not used) but it was a very engaging experience. It was a debate unlike any other in the history of the world. It was much better than watching it on TV.

It was a little anti-climactic and it was effective. That's a good place for technology to be these days. We won't feel the same watching talking heads banter without viewer commentary ever again.

Discuss

A team of leading bloggers from the early days of AOL-acquired Weblogs Inc. has come together again to build their ideal blogging software and raise a new network of blogs to challenge top sites in personal electronics, eco-awareness and other niches yet to be announced. Calling themselves Crowd Fusion, the company is lead by Weblogs Inc. co-founder Brian Alvey and has raised $3 million in venture capital from investors like Netscape and Ning co-founder Marc Andreeson and Ross Levinsohn, one of the key players in the Fox acquisition of MySpace.

The company's first site launched this week and we got a look at the blog software powering it - both are beautiful.

Obsessable

Called Obsessable, Crowd Fusion's first site focuses on personal electronics. Features Editor (and former Producer at AOL's Engadget) Barb Dybwad says the site "covers personal technology and consumer electronics from the point of view of experts writing for people who may not be. This is consumer tech without the snark, where you don't have to be a member of the techier-than-thou club to be a part of the community."

The site looks great; it's a combination of news, reviews, feature columns, aggregated links from off-site and special pages called "Comparators." These Comparators are AJAX comparison charts of features across multiple products in the same sector and the pages are really well designed. See, for example, this chart comparing the specs of the T-Mobile Google Phone to six other leading phones.

Obsessable is just the first of a large number of big sites the company aims at launching. November will see a TreeHugger competitor in the eco market and as many as 7 other verticals will be tackled in the next year. All the sites will have a heavy database component to them, as Obsessable does with its product Comparator. The company's aim is to be bigger than existing blog market leaders by being more accessible and leveraging super-efficient blogging software to publish more content faster.

The Blogging Platform

The Crowd Fusion blogging platform was built by CEO Brian Alvey and CTO Craig Wood. It is the foundation of the company. Alvey was Jason Calacanis's less obnoxious co-founder at Weblogs. He built the BlogSmith platform that now powers AOL properties including gossip mega-site TMZ, Engadget and many others. With Crowd Fusion, Alvey and team have tried to take the lessons they've learned as some of the most experienced high-scale blog publishers on the web and build an even better publishing system.

What's so special about it? The system has a built-in RSS reader that team leaders seed with subscriptions (writers can add more at will), it's easy to push related links from other blogs out onto the published site and the system allows for the management of multiple responsibilities for posts like finding and sizing images, copy editing and more. Obsessable says it is aggregating about 1,000 topical links each day from around the web. It's all pretty involved but we couldn't help but be jealous of the publishing interface.

The company has 12 people working in Corporate and Tech departments and so far has around 10 freelance writers covering gadget news on Obsessable. It describes itself as "a new web publishing platform, built to solve the pain points of publishers at scale." That platform will not be available for licensing for some time.

Will a heavy duty publishing system help this new company challenge some of the biggest blogs on the web? The team involved certainly improves the odds.

Images of the Crowd Fusion publishing tool, click for full-size versions and continue below for more.

The Team

In addition to successful and well connected backers, Crowd Fusion is made up of a real dream-team of blogging industry trailblazers. Joining founding CEO Alvey, the Chief Operating Officer from Weblogs Inc. Judith Meskill is COO of the new company after under a year at Johnson&Johnson;'s site BabyCenter. Meskill knows how to build up blogs fast and orchestrate a large number of freelance writers. She's been working on Crowd Fusion since the beginning of the year.

CTO Craig Wood is a Search Engine Optimization specialist from fast-growing firm Did-it, a friend of Alvey's for 20 years and a former member of the BlogSmith team. CMO Steve Friedman worked on advertising at Weblogs Inc. and will be an essential asset to the team as good ad sales is much easier said than done.

The team member that really raised our eyebrows the most was Barb Dybwad, Obsessable's Features Editor, past Producer at Engadget and key player in the launch of several of AOL's biggest gaming sites. Dybwad's departure from AOL was a major loss for the company. A widely admired, long-term member of the tech blogosphere, Dybwad was highly sought after by top blogs for years. That she didn't leave AOL until the old team could get back together again is telling.

Crowd Fusion brings together a powerful cast with the publishing technology they've long made plans for. A time of looming economic crisis may not be ideal to launch a blog network, but incumbent leaders in topical online publishing certainly have some new competition to watch out for.

Discuss

According to the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study, 93% of Americans believe that a company should have a presence on social media sites and 85 percent believe that these companies should use these services to interact with consumers. Cone, a Boston-based consulting firm, also found that men are far more likely to interact with a company through social media than women are. 56% of consumers believe that a company is providing them with a better service by interacting with them on social media sites.

The numbers in this study are bit higher than those we have seen before (we assume that Cone uses a relatively broad definition of 'social media'), though the general trends do fall in line with the latest data from Universal McCann we wrote about last week.

As Michael Chin points out on the KickApps blog, social media first changed how we interacted with friends, family, and customers. Now, as consumers are getting more familiar with these tools, they also expect them to be a way to interact with companies - and based on this data from Cone, they want this to be a two-way conversation.

Here are some other interesting data points from the study:

• 60% of Americans regularly interact with companies on a social media site
• 43% of consumers say that companies should use social networks to solve the consumers' problems
• 41% believe that companies should use social media tools to solicit feedback on products and services
• Men are more likely to use social media tools to interact with a company than women (33% vs. 17%)
• 33% of younger consumers (18-34) and those with household incomes over $75,000 believe that companies should try to market to them through social networks

It would be nice to see Cone break these numbers down a bit more. What types of social media sites, for example, do users prefer? Are there any specific categories of companies and brands that they want to see on these sites? How exactly do they want to be marketed to? What do they think about implications for their privacy?

What is clear, however, is that social media is quickly becoming an important means for companies to reach consumers - and that consumer are also quickly changing their expectations about how, when, and where they want to be marketed to. As more users are embracing social media (and often to the detriment of traditional media), companies have no choice but to follow them.

Discuss

Blogging is a fast medium, that's one of its advantages over traditional media. There are bloggers who specialize in reporting fast about breaking news on a wide variety of topics. Most of those bloggers use Google's RSS publishing technology FeedBurner as a middleman to deliver their posts to subscribers and capture analytics.

If FeedBurner decides to take its sweet time in delivering the news, that's bad for bloggers. Unfortunately, that's what's happening right now. We've been seeing delays of up to 20 minutes between posting to our site and our posts appearing in our FeedBurner feeds. That's a pretty serious problem and we're not alone in experiencing it.

Bloggers who contact FeedBurner to complain are being told that the service is changing ping servers, something they are going to announce once all the kinks are worked out. The new ping server URL is http://ping.feedburner.google.com - so if you want to let your readers know about posts hot off the presses, that's where you want your blogging software to send the news instead of the old ping URL. You can ping both servers and the new ping server is just for the feeds that have migrated to the Google Feedproxy servers, but that could well be you.

If you're still pinging the old URL, and you probably are, we're guessing that FeedBurner isn't even noticing. The service checks all indexed blogs for new posts automatically every 30 minutes so that's probably how your posts are getting noticed at all. FeedBurner says both ping servers are still operating but we only noticed the issue after seeing lengthy delays in updating.

The Consequences We Face

We love FeedBurner for all it does for us, but this is pretty irresponsible on their part. We've noticed that our posts are being seen late by Techmeme, subscribers are getting them later and when other bloggers do a blogsearch for a breaking news topic to see who else has covered it - we're not there. It's bad news. Meanwhile the FeedBurner blog hasn't been updated in 4 months.

In response to an inquiry about the issue, Steve Olechowski, Business Product Manager at AdSense (Adsense now being the raison d'être for our beloved publishing tool) told us, "there's nothing secret here, we're just trying to make sure everything works as expected for publishers before we get a deluge of emails about issues we already know about." That seems like a pretty snide response to a common part of customer service - getting emails about issues you already know about.

We're pinging the new server now and we hope that will work. We suggest you update your software as well and we hope that FeedBurner will be more sympathetic to the needs of the bloggers they exist to serve in the future.

Discuss

Being able to access your files from anywhere and from any computer is one of the great conveniences of the always-on Internet. Online file storage has been around for quite a while, but the latest generation of services are so cheap and easy to use that there is almost no reason not to back some of your files up into the cloud. Most online storage providers also give you the ability to then share these files with your friends and colleagues. We selected the services on this list because they have a good track record of keeping your data safe while providing you easy access to your files from wherever you are.

Box.net

Box.net has been around for quite a while, but is still one of our favorite places to store documents online. Thanks to its integration with numerous online services, including Gmail, Zoho, picnick, and Scribd, box.net can not only store all your documents, but can also function as the hub of your virtual office.

One other nice feature of box.net is that you can share your files and folders with 'collaborators,' which makes it a good service to exchange files within a small business or among friends.

The storage limit for the free accounts is 1GB, which is plenty if you mostly exchange text documents or spreadsheets. Paid accounts start at $7.95 a month and include more advanced features, including 5GB of storage, a versioning system, mobile access, and 24/7 phone support.

Live Mesh

The online storage component of Live Mesh is only one part of Micorsoft's latest venture into cloud computing, but it is also one of its most compelling features at this point. Live Mesh gives you 5GB of online storage and an online desktop that looks a lot like Windows Vista. You can upload any type of file to Live Mesh, but you cannot edit any of your files through the online desktop. In the future, though, we expect Microsoft to start adding more of these features.

One of the main reasons we like Mesh is because it constantly watches for changes in the folders you are synchronizing to it and updates them automatically. In addition, you can share folders with friends, allowing you to collaborate on projects.

Live Mesh works on both Windows PCs and Macs.

DropBox

Few online storage services integrate with your desktop as well as DropBox, which only recently opened up to the public after an extensive beta test. While you do have to install a small program on your machine to run DropBox, it is well worth it. Besides setting up a folder on your machine, which automatically syncs with DropBox, you can also set DropBox up to then sync that folder with other machines, similar to Live Mesh. DropBox lets you upload any type of file, as long as it is smaller than 350MB. DropBox uses Amazon's S3 service as its storage solution and provides its users with 2GB of free storage. For $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year, you can buy 50GB of storage.

One of our favorite features of DropBox is that it preserves every revision of every file. You can also easily share folders with your friends or colleagues.

DropBox supports Windows XP and Vista, Mac OSX, and Linux.

Oosah

Oosah's main selling point is simple: you get a whopping 1 terabyte of storage for media files. One restriction of Oosah is that you can't use it for text documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, which seems a bit weird, given that those types of files are generally small.

One interesting aspect of Oosah is that it accepts RAW image files from most camera manufacturers, though it automatically converts them into JPGs. You can also connect to your Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube accounts and view your images and videos from those services in one central place. Oosah also gives you Media RSS feeds and even a podcast feed for your audio files.

While we love Oosah for its general ease of use, the one aspect we really did not enjoy was the fact that uploading files seems to be unnecessarily hard. Oosah does not provide any desktop clients and while you can use the web based uploader to select multiple files, uploading multiple directories at a time is not an option.

JungleDisk

JungleDisk is the only service in this list that is not available for free - and technically, it is not even an online storage service. Instead, it provides a frontend to Amazon's S3 storage service. JungleDisk costs $20 and after that, you pay Amazon for the storage and transfer of your files. JungleDisk also lets you map your Amazon S3 storage space as a network drive on your computer, so that you can just drag and drop files back and forth between your online storage and your local desktop.

JungleDisk is available for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.

Other Services

Online storage is a competitive market. The best services integrate fully with your desktop and allow you to effortlessly upload and download files. They also provide you with an online desktop to access files from any computers and are stable and dependable. A service that does not fulfill these basic requirements is going to have a hard time convincing users to use and trust it.

There are, of course, a large number of other online storage services that we did not include in this list. BOXSTr, for example, is a great application, but it constantly bothers you with ads and attempts to sell you their premium service. AOL's Xdrive is a great service, too, but we have heard too many rumors that AOL is trying to sell the service or that they will simply close it to be able to recommend it anymore.

The one company that is suspiciously missing from this list is Google. While you can upload your documents to Google Docs, the company that has made cloud computing a household name does not have a dedicated file storage service. While rumors about the existence of a 'GDrive' have regularly appeared in the tech blogosphere over the last few year, users still have to rely on hacks like the GMail Drive shell extension to store their files on Google's servers.

What Did We Miss?

Do you have a favorite service that we did not list? Let us know in the comments.

Logo courtesy of Flickr user blakespot.

Discuss

Just in time for tonight's first presidential debate (which, as we just learned, will indeed take place), Twitter has launched an election themed site that tracks all the political tweets on the service. Twitter regularly determines a set of 'Hot Election Topics' and displays every tweet that fits into these categories in a automatically updating stream. While this is definitely a compelling way to use Twitter, we can't help but wonder if Twitter will bring some of the features of this site to other parts of the service.

Politweets, of course, has been providing a similar service for quite a while already, but its scope is limited to just filtering out tweets with the candidates' names in it. Twitter, on the other hand, uses a constantly changing set of keywords, which makes it far more dynamic.

Automatic Updates and Memetracking

The most compelling feature of Twitter's election site is actually quite simple: the automatically updating stream. That's one feature we have always missed on our regular Twitter homepages and also one of the most compelling reason to use a desktop client instead of Twitter's site.

The value of a service like this is often not so much in the content of a single tweet, but in the aggregation and real-time view of the discussion. Even Twitter's Summize-based search does not update automatically. We have started to use Monitter to track Twitter conversations when there is a breaking news story because it updates automatically.

In addition, as Josh Catone points out, Twitter sits on a goldmine of similar information that it is not putting to good use yet. Now that they have this infrastructure in place, Twitter could easily create similar sites for other events, or even allow its users to create their own Twitter-based memetrackers in the future.

Discuss

This is the third part in a multi-part series about integrating the internet with the real world through barcode scanning technology.

In the first two articles we looked at the history of scanning barcodes with your mobile phone, newspaper print ads, and a new effort to bring barcodes to web printouts. Now we'll look at other uses of the technology including scanning products in store, scanning broadcast media, and even exchanging contact information with others through the use of barcodes.

Up until now, we've focused on scanning barcodes printed on paper, but that's not the only place where the mobile barcode scanning technology is being used. The ultimate goal for barcodes is to have them everywhere, from t-shirts to stickers to TV. Let look at what innovations are happening in these areas today.

Things You Can Do Today

To get you excited about the promise of what barcoding can bring, we'll take a look at what you can do with barcodes today as well as some of the industry trends. Since barcoding is still new to the U.S., this may be old news to some of our international visitors, but bear with us...we're trying to catch up here!

1) Tag The World With Wikis

Instead of waiting for someone else to provide barcodes for you to scan, you can get involved with Semapedia instead. Semapedia.org is a non-profit project whose goal is to connect the physical world with relevant knowledge from Wikipedia. The community is encouraged to create 2D barcodes (QR Codes) and then venture out into the real world and attach them to objects. Any URL from Wikipedia, Wikinews, Wikibooks, and Wikisource can be used. While we love this innovative idea, a quick look at their map showed very few places where these codes have been used.

2) Exchange Contact Data With Your iPhone / Cameraphone

In Japan, you'll find QR codes everywhere including business cards, id cards, magazines, newspapers, flyers, posters, stickers, food products,puzzles, web sites, billboards,and more. (Thanks for the links, David Harper!) But here in the U.S. it seems we're still struggling to get the trend started. So why not let iPhone users lead the way? If you have an iPhone, there is one app that lets you exchange contact data with others through the use of barcodes - just like the Japanese do! The app is called QRContact (iTunes link) and it generates a contact's details as a barcode. To use it, you simply click on the "Address Book" button to select the person in your address book whose details you want to turn into a barcode. Of course, that means you'll have to enter your own information in your contacts in order to exchange the info with others.  The recipient would then only need a barcode reader application installed on their device in order to read the code and add the info to their address book. Do a search in iTunes for "barcode" and you'll find a few free readers to choose from that will do the trick.

3) Get Nerdy With Patches and Pillows

In an email from self-described "barcode nerd" John Young, we learned of all sorts of fun barcoded-related projects. He began by making a barcoded needlepoint pillow featuring a 2D barcode that linked to the Wikipedia page for pillow. After getting a little exposure on both BoingBoing and the NYT, he decided to extend the project and is now selling needlepoint canvases with custom QR Codes on them. You can find them here on Etsy: http://nerdlepoint.etsy.com.

After having so much fun with that, John decided to explore other wearables. Since so many people were already making and selling QR Code t-shirts (see our review of Japanese co. C-Shirt, too, if you're interested in how wearables work), he decided to venture into the world of patches instead. He launched the site http://p8tch.com where he sells velcro-backed "commando nerd patches." The system lets you change the target of your QR Code sort of like how TinyURL operates, so your patch can read something different whenever you want.

4) Scan Products In The Store (Coming Soon, Perhaps)

A company looking to take mobile barcode reading mainstream in the real world is StoreXperience. This m-commerce platform allows consumers to capture 2D barcodes from products. Consumers could then see product information, including local availability and customized offers right on their mobile handsets. StoreXperience isn't just limited to 2D barcodes, though. Their technology also supports RFID tags and soon 1D barcodes, too. Unfortunately, although StoreXperience has built a platform they aren't in any noteworthy stores as of today. We're disappointed that you can't actually use this technology yet, but we're keeping our eye on it.

5) Find A House?

John Young (see above) is now investigating the use of barcodes for real estate. He thinks it would be great if there was something (besides an infotube) which potential buyers could read while they're standing right there at the house. How about a mobile web-page linked by a barcode? To learn how to make your own barcode to do this too, keep reading...

6) Get Your Own Reader And Make Your Own Codes

Yesterday we mentioned the NeoReader, but as some pointed out, NeoMedia hasn't always played nice in this space. There are other readers you can use if you would rather support efforts of a more open nature. For example, the Kaywa Reader (go to http://reader.kaywa.com to see if your phone is supported); Google's zxing reader which was designed for Android but supposedly works on iPhone, too;  i-nigma; QuickMark; upcode; or, for Nokia phones, there's an entire web site devoted to barcodes at http://mobilecodes.nokia.com. You can also try semacode, connexto, or scanzoom. These last three may be helpful to owners of older Nokia phones that can't use the reader provided on the nokia.com site. In the EU only, you can try the reader from activeprint.org. The Japanese apparently don't need our help, but if you want to see what one of their readers looks like, check out camreader. Then prepare to be very jealous: in Japan, they can scan the barcodes of everyday objects to be taken to the mobile version of the Japanese Amazon.com for that product.

But here in the U.S. and other parts of the pre-barcoded world, you may wonder what good is it to have a reader if you don't have any codes. Maybe it's time for us to generate our own codes and let the business world catch up with our own innovation! Right now there are numerous sites that let you generate your own codes. What you choose to do with those codes is up to you. Make t-shirts, stickers, flyers, posters, or anything else you want. Try the Kaywa QR-code generator, Nokia Mobile Codes, Winksite (which can also generate codes for RSS feeds), Denso-Wave creators, DataMatrix generator by IDAutomation, QR Code Generator by NFC Games, viooli, or even the Firefox plugin Mobile Barcoder.

OK, Barcodes Are Cool, But Here's What You Should Be Worried About

If you're not much of a do-it-yourselfer, there's a good chance the technology will come to you. Earlier this month, CTIA announced a "Camera-Phone Based Barcode Scanning White Paper" (PDF) during a keynote event where they also demoed the technology. In the paper, they endorse two bar code formats: the open standard Data Matrix and the proprietary EZ Code. CTIA Vice-President of Wireless Internet Development Mark Desautels predicted that handsets using the technology will be widely available in 12-18 months.

On the surface, that sounds like good news: if you just wait, barcoding will come to you, right? As it turns out, it's not quite that simple. The proprietary EZ Code isn't read by anything except ScanLife by Scanbuy, so essentially, CTIA just endorsed one company's product. It's worth noting that Scanbuy was on the team defining the standard, Correction: Scanbuy was working with several carriers in a CTIA-initiated trial that contributed to the results of the white paper (as well as explaining to carrier executives how it should work), too. Opinion: Conflict of interest much?

The other standard supported by CTIA, DataMatrix, is an open standard and is free. Well, except for having to go through the Scanbuy gateway for processing. What that means is that in the indirect DataMatrix model, you ca't embed a URL in the barcode that resolves directly by DNS to a web address. Instead, the codes are given an ID number and these IDs are sent to a gateway for processing - a sort of man-in-the-middle (and potential bottleneck) who monitors the "clicks."

That's why the barcoding advocates here in the U.S. want you to support the open QR Code format. This is the more popular format internationally and is used in other countries like Japan, Australia, UK, and elsewhere. Thanks to its open format and freely available readers, innovation has flourished.

There are plenty of companies ready for this technology when it arrives. For example, CEO Ron Feldman of the text messaging reminder service Kwiry tells us that they plan to implement 2D/Mobile Bar Code input support when a critical mass of phones/consumers are actually capable of using this technology. Hopefully, that's only a matter of time.

Photo Credit: QR Scanning: PSD; QRCode Future: avlxyz

See also: The Scannable World, Part 1: Mobile Phones As Barcode Scanners
The Scannable World, Part 2: Scanning Your Web Printouts

Discuss

We live in an age when success of innovation is mixed with unprecedented failures. On one hand we're reinventing the web, fighting for a greener future and building genomix. On the other there are housing bubbles, credit crises and war.

The technology patent crisis is important to our future. For decades the patent law served its purpose. Inventors used copyrights, trademarks and patents to protect their work and launch their innovations. But today's technology intellectual property system is a failure - unable to keep up with the speed of innovation, it's fallen apart.

The result? We live in an age of open source ideas. We freely borrow and build on each other's solutions. At first glance this may seem fine, but there are important consequences that may change the way we innovate. What happens when a big company copies a startup? What happens when dozens of startups copy each other?

In this post we work through these and other questions, in attempting to understand where intellectual property in technology is heading.

The Good Old Patents

The word patent comes from Latin and means to lay open. Patents were established as the means by which inventors disclose their products to the public. In a typical process the inventor would write down the steps, or the algorithm, for the creation and send it to the patent office for consideration.

Once granted, the patent serves as a protection for the invention. Legally, no one is allowed to copy the invention; instead, they're required to license it and typically pay royalties.

The patent is granted for a limited, usually lengthy, period of time. After the patent expires, the innovation becomes essentially public and now can be used by anyone. So the protection that inventors enjoy comes at a cost, for they eventually have to give up their invention.

Previously, when facing the choice between disclosing an invention or not, people did so more often than not. The reason: the time span the patent held was sufficient to make money because of the exclusivity guaranteed by the patent.

The system worked quite well when the world was slower, but the recent acceleration changed everything. With time to market being much shorter, the patent system instantly become ridiculous and obsolete.

The Patent Crisis

Here's a simple scenario. A startup produces an innovative idea and works with a patent lawyer to file a patent. This takes a considerable amount of time (a few months at least) and a substantial amount of money ($25K+). But the startup does it anyway and after the patent is filed, people feel comforted that their idea is safe.

Right? Of course not! Not even close. Any patent filed today will take 4-6 years to approve. In the current era where a week is a long time and a year is an eternity, the time to process a patent is unbearably long. Because of this gap, filing a patent appears useless. While you can threaten based on a pending patent, people are unlikely to take it seriously.

Litigating software patents in court is expensive and often unsuccessful. The problem is that with software you can do things slightly differently and the patent becomes unenforceble. This is because lawmakers ensure patent claims are as narrow as possible. For example, if someone implements just a piece of the whole system differently, the court is unlikely to rule in your favor.

The Age of Shameless Stealing

The problem is that while your patent is pending, competitors can copy your ideas and build on them. By the time your patent is granted, competitors can already win the market, be profitable, or even exit out of business.

The mismatch between the time it takes to get the patent and time it takes to copy the innovation encourages the copycats. Today's software industry is flooded with clones.

There are dozens of me too! startups for each major technology area. All the startups are borrowing ideas, UI elements and functionality from each other. And because of the powerful technology at our disposal copying is so easy. Someone said to me once: Oh we don't want to use your technology, my dev guys can whip out something like this in a couple of days.

Sadly, the age of open source ideas is actually the age of shameless stealing.

Who Wins?

Startups copy each other, but the problem doesn't stop there. It gets worse when web giants copy startups. Once your idea gets incorporated into a big company's offering, things get tough.

A recent example is new Google browser Chrome. No doubt, it's a spectacular piece of software - elegant, simple, probably the browser of the future. A lot of the ideas in Chrome are not original, but taken from other browsers and add-ons.

Is this fair? Not really. But in today's tech world, the word fair has been replaced with the phrase fair game. Luckily for startups, most big companies are not good at execution, so it isn't that easy for them to copy. But when and if a large company comes out with a clone, the match is unfair.

Resources and distribution certainly matter when it comes to tech adoption, so the patent situation is strongly in favor of big companies. They can observe the market, see what ideas take off, and cherry pick what they see as interesting.

Who Really Wins

Perhaps the biggest irony in this patent debacle is that it benefits customers. Previously a patent would create a lock, a barrier to entry, while today innovation occurs with greater speed.

Because patents are irrelevant, companies small and large relentlessly go after each other, raising the bar, coming up with better products. At the end of the day this benefits the users.

We're observing an evolutionary dynamic where companies are battling for viewers. This is a street fight where the gloves are off and big money is at stake. Companies are pushing each other to deliver better software faster. In the meantime, users are enjoying the new elegant tools as well as the fight itself.

The Future of Technology Innovation

Where is all this heading? What is the future of innovation and intellectual property around it?

The status quo doesn't make sense. The laws need to be useful, and current patent laws are obsolete and inadequate. Is there a middle ground between old patents and no laws at all? Brad Feld, who has written a lot on this topic over the past years, thinks the answer is no:

"After wrestling with software patents for 15 years, I've concluded there simply is no middle ground. If we continue on the path we're on, patents will increase in their overall expense to the system. Everyone will feel compelled to apply for as many (and as broad) patents as possible, if only for defensive reasons."

In a related post, Fred Wilson writes a cliche of the week: Patents are like nuclear bombs, you just got to have some. He continues:

"I have never seen patents make a business, but I have seen lack of patents hurt a business on many occasions. IP battles are like the cold war. Those who have patents can keep others honest because nobody wants to start a war that might end in everyone's destruction. But those who have no patents are sitting ducks and don't have the weapons to keep others honest. My advice to entrepreneurs is always file a bunch of patents. But don't expect they'll ever do more than keep others at bay."

It doesn't seem satisfactory either way. To not have patents at all means that at the end of the day big companies will always absorb all the best innovation for free. Filing patents just for the sake of having weapons that you're likely never to use seems costly and wasteful.

Is there a middle ground? What would you like to see happen in the future with software intellectual property?

Discuss

While Muxtape's Justin Ouellette just posted a dire story about the shutdown of the popular mixtape service and his dealings with the music industry, Favtape has updated its service dramatically.

Muxtape will effectively remain closed for the general public and will only return as a music hosting service for bands. Favtape, on the other hand, now looks like Muxtape on steroids, with embeddable playlists, album art, integrated YouTube search, a shuffle mode, and the ability to create tapes based on your last.fm and Pandora bookmarks.

Favtape: Muxtape on Steroids

While Favtape once started out as a simple Muxtape clone, this new release goes far beyond Muxtape's feature set. One of the most important differences with Muxtape is that you do not have to upload any songs to create a mixtape. Instead, Favtape lets you search for your music and add it to your playlists. To do this, Favtape makes use of SeeqPod's APIs.

Favtape does not host any of the songs itself, but solely relies on SeeqPod's index for its music. SeeqPod indexes MP3s anywhere on the Internet, which surely leaves some doors open for copyright infringement claims by the RIAA. As Ars Technica reports, SeeqPod has already been sued by the RIAA for exactly this business model of providing a 'playable search engine.' If SeeqPod shuts down, Favtape will be left without any music to play.

From a user's perspective, however, Favtape is everything one could wish for in a mixtape service, including a list of the top songs on iTunes and Last.fm, as well as iPhone support and the ability to share your tapes by email or as a Twitter message. Favtape also includes numerous social features and lets you vote for tapes you like.

While we are sad to see the Muxtape we once loved disappear, it is great to see other services jumping into the breach and building upon Muxtape's foundation. It's probably not the perfect streaming music service, but it comes pretty close. Now we just have to hope that it will not be shut down too soon.

Mixtape from http://favtape.com/frederic/RWW Test

Discuss

Yesterday we wrote about a new Pew study that found that only 11% of people in the US who use the internet at work are using it to read blogs. We've seen other studies that put this number much higher, but Pew's is probably the most objective.

It's really a shame that more people aren't reading blogs at work, and we don't just say that because we'd like the increased readership. If you're not reading blogs at work, you may not be doing your job as well as you could be. Below we discuss three advantages to reading blogs on the job and offer examples of the kinds of blogs that people could benefit from reading in three different non-tech professions.

We recognize that the single biggest barrier to feeling justified in reading blogs on the clock may be that most people simply don't know how to find the best blogs that are relevant to their work. For that we refer you to our recent post Comparing Six Ways to Find the Best Blogs on Any Topic and we discuss specific tactics you can use below.

Think there's not blogs you should be reading on your particular job? We tested our theory in the second half of this post by finding the top blogs for Human Resources professionals, Physical Therapists and Fire Inspectors. We found good work blogs for them all!

The Advantages of Reading Blogs on the Job

Staying Up to the Moment on News

You may think you don't need to be any more up to date on the news in your field than traditional media already makes you - but those who hold that belief do so to their own strategic detriment. While blogs may suffer from looser editorial standards and fewer resources for in-depth research than traditional media does - those disadvantages are often less important than might be assumed. Meanwhile, blogs have a major advantage in terms of speed. Blogs write about things first and people who read blogs thus know things first. That creates what's called First Mover Advantage.

The Wikipedia entry on First Mover Advantage is an interesting collection of academic findings on the topic. Much of it comes from a study by MB Lieberman and DB Montgomery twenty years ago in 1987. To summarize: Being the first to know about important information allows you to do things like secure resources for which the cost will increase once the news increasing their value is more widely known. It allows you to position yourself as the incumbent party responsible for certain tasks, after which point others are unlikely to take the risk of looking elsewhere if you've already got that base covered. Knowing important information first, consistently, puts you in a position of leadership and opens doors for opportunities in general.

Admittedly this is an extrapolation to reference first mover advantage in the context of individual work performance, as it tends to be studied in reference to the performance of entire businesses. Even that research has come under question - Pieter A. Van der Werf and John F. Mahon argued a decade ago, for example, that studies supporting the existence of first mover advantage depended on particular research methodology and worked only when market share was measured instead of other criteria like profitability or survival. They argued that more objective study found no first mover advantage superior to random statistical chance.

All that said, we find the concepts articulated by Lieberman and Montgomery about first mover advantage to be compelling and valid in our experience.

Tools to Use

Reading blogs is great for first mover advantage, but if you'd like to take things to the next level - check out the various instant alert services online like Zaptxt, Pingie, Alerts.com and others.

Knowing What People are Talking About

The ClueTrain Manifesto famously said almost 10 years ago that "markets are conversations." What does that mean? That business in the age of the internet is done properly through communicative input and output. Reading blogs at work is an important part of that conversation.

The ClueTrain framed its insight largely in language of fear, that businesses who don't get a clue risk watching the train leave them behind at the station. The benefits of listening to what people are saying online can be articulated in a positive sense, though, as well.

Peter G.P. Walters recently published an article titled "Adding value in global B2B supply chains: Strategic directions and the role of the Internet as a driver of competitive advantage." In that article Walters explains that the "disintermediation" [bringing together for direct communication] effect of the internet in business creates new "opportunities for intermediaries [in a supply chain] to generate incremental value for other channel members." In other words: the internet lets us know more about each others' needs and thus see opportunities to fill them. Very few things are as helpful in learning about how people are doing business as the easy publishing of blogs and blog comments.

Are blogs representative of market needs in general? They may or may not be, but at the very least they will point you directly to particular business opportunities among their writers and readers. In as much as blogs tend to write about the world at large, we do think they are a good place to find an orientation with regards to larger emerging market trends.

Tools to Use

There are a lot of different ways to pay attention to what people are talking about in your industry's blogs. Some people subscribe to blog search for keywords instead of subscribing to individual blogs. Many good RSS readers allow you to create "smart folders" containing only the posts from your subscriptions that contain certain keywords. Our favorite method? A service called AideRSS will show you just the most talked about posts on any blog.

Reference Resources

While many allege that bloggers cannot be trusted further than we can be thrown, in practice there are many fields in which professionalism and blogging are no longer opposites. In search results, in mainstream media and in other places where bloggers used not to be welcome - we now are referenced as working experts on our respective topics. That's more true in some fields than in others, but the point is that there is a whole lot of useful information to be found in the archives of leading blogs.

Tools to Use

We've said it before and we'll say it again: few simple services on the web today are as powerfully useful as Google's Custom Search Engines (CSEs). Make a list, give it a name and Google will give you a link you can visit to search only inside the websites you put on your list. Here at RWW we use CSEs built from lists of top blogs in various niche topics all the time. We love them. They are timely, thorough and super efficient.

Topical Blogs

But I Work in Field XYZ - Are There Blogs I Should Read?

Yes. There almost definitely are. As we mentioned above, we've written here before about a number of ways to find the top blogs on any topic. Just to test our own theory, we used those methods to find some top blogs in three different fields outside of technology. Here's what we found.

If you work in Human Resources then you've got it made. There are a huge number of great looking HR blogs on the web, particularly when it comes to employment law.

We found active community and useful looking information on the KnowHR blog, which specializes in discussing issues regarding HR communication. The Employment Law Post is home to a number of popular HR blogs as well.

We'll stop there for now but there are a whole lot more to discover in the Technorati index of HR blogs. Give it a look and pay attention to each blog's "authority," that's the number of other blogs have linked to that one in the past 6 months.

If you are a Physical Therapist there is a smaller field of expert blogs but there are still plenty of options. We found the NPA Think Tank by looking at links tagged physicaltherapist+blog on Delicious. We found the much-commented on blog for MyPhsyicalTherapyspace by looking at the most popular blogs linking to the American Physical Therapists Association webpage via Ask.com's blogsearch. PT practitioners would likely benefit as well from watching the weekly summaries of the best posts from around the medical blogosphere in a years-old series called Grand Rounds. We found that fabulous looking resource via the Health section of blog and news aggregator AllTop.

What if your job is to be a Fire Inspector? Surely you should be checking fire-extinguishers, wandering around industrial facilities and making lists of needed repairs at work - not reading blogs, right?

Well, it turns out that there are some blogs out there for you, too. This was the most obscure corner of the blogosphere we looked at, admittedly, but we still found some good looking blogs on the topic. Inspector911 is appreciated enough to get comments on almost every post on the site. The blog at Fire-professionals doesn't get many comments but does a great job of collecting and commenting on fire-industry news from around the web. We found it by doing a Google Blogsearch for Inspector911.com and found the it via a link. Similar coverage is provided by ConstructionInformer, a blog about construction news around the world.

Finally, if you're a fire inspector then you probably pay attention to the International Code Council. They don't have a blog, but they do have daily news and issue regular news releases. Neither section of their site offers subscription so we scraped an RSS feed using Dapper.net and then ran that feed through Feedburner. Thus you can now subscribe to ICC News Releases in the same RSS reader that you read your fire inspector blogs in.

Conclusion: You Should Read Blogs At Work

That short survey of various non-tech occupations and the blogs that serve them left us comfortable saying that there really are good blogs for you to read at work no matter what you do for a living. We hope the links above are helpful for you to find good blogs about your work.

It's clear, by the numbers and in our anecdotal experience, that very few people who use the internet at work are using it to read blogs. We expect that to change, but for now we'll just argue here on our blog that it would be a very good idea for people to do so. It's an essential daily act of professional development. So get back to work and read some more blogs!

Title pic: "untitled" by Eye of Einstien

Discuss

Google has just released a mini-site explaining "the facts" about the contentious advertising deal it announced with Yahoo in June. The deal will go live in early October, according to a report on SearchEngineLand, so the mini-site is an attempt to outline how it will work - and why consumers, publishers, competitors (and the US government) have nothing to fear from it.

In a presentation up on the mini-site, which we've embedded below, Google states that one of the benefits of this arrangement is that "Yahoo! remains a vibrant and innovative presence on the Internet". Which is putting Yahoo!'s position rather bluntly. The crux of the deal though is that Yahoo! will be able to better monetize the 'long tail' of their search, using Google's near invincible Adsense.

Here are the main points, according to Google:

* This is a non-exclusive deal that will strengthen Yahoo!.
* Ad prices will continue to be set by competitive auction.
* The deal is win-win for consumers, advertisers and publishers: more and better ads.

That the deal will strengthen Yahoo! is, unfortunately for Yahoo!, not the contentious point of this arrangement. Indeed we at ReadWriteWeb have first hand experience of why Yahoo! needs this deal. We recently switched back from Yahoo Publisher Network (their attempt at an Adsense alternative) back to Adsense, precisely because the YPN long tail results were so poor. It's no coincidence that our CPC ads, which display as a backup to our CPM ads, have gotten much more relevant and contextual since we switched back. Unfortunately that told us a lot about the state of YPN.

Let's be frank, Google has got Yahoo by the short and curlies with this deal - and the presentation below isn't afraid to give it another twist.

The contentious part of the deal is whether it gives Google a dominant position in the online advertising industry, and therefore will it be bad for consumers and competitors (specifically Microsoft). The closest the mini-site comes to addressing this is slide 10, which has a list of things that the deal is apparently not:

What the deal is NOT

* Not a merger
* Does not remove a competitor from the playing field
* Does not prevent Yahoo! from making similar deals with others
* Does not increase Google's share of search traffic
* Does not let Google set prices for advertisers
* Does not give Google any equity stake in Yahoo!

It remains to be seen whether American antitrust authorities are convinced by these arguments, or not.

Another point of contention is that Google, once again, makes no mention of the percentage of ad revenue they take. In other words: if there is not enough competition in the market for Adsense, then publishers could end up getting a lower share of the revenue from Adsense as a result. Which is a valid concern for publishers and not one that the slideshow addresses adequately.

One interesting side-benefit of the deal is that it will also enable interoperability between Yahoo IM and Google Talk. This benefits Google more than Yahoo, given that Yahoo is one of the market leaders in IM and Google is not.

Here is the full presentation. Let us know in the comments what you think:

Discuss

I created a Top 10 Blog list for SixApart’s Blogs.com list of Top 10 lists site.  It’s called “Marc Canter’s Top 10 List of Open Social Networking Blogs”  :-)  I just love playing kingmaker. NOT. Apologies to all the homeboys and homegrrls who DIDN’T make it onto my list.  I’m right between Popular Stock blogs and Tasty Vegan blogs.

This notion of Kevin Lynch (Adobe)  talking about open source is comical.  Where can I download the source code to Photoshop or Flash?

MySpace Music is like a feature that Cyworld has had for several years.  They allow you to offer playlists of music to listen to, coupled to your MySpace page.  This creates HUGE amounts of stickiness and is a viable busienss model as well!

Do not piss of Dave Letterman

When you piss of Warren Buffet then he’s not gonna forget.

Steve Gillmor and I did a Gillmor Gang about Portable Contacts and Y! OS.

Become a Schlepper

The program for LeWeb8 is live now.  I’ll be doing a panel with the BigCos - and we’ll be trying to find some Love for each other (Google, MySpace, Facebook, SixApart) and their customers.  I’m sure we’ll find it - we just gotta all make sure to wear condoms.

This is the second post in a multi-part series about integrating the internet with the real world.

In "The Scannable World: Mobile Phones As Barcode Scanners," we introduced the concept of using your phone to scan barcoded objects in the real world. We also touched on some of the history surrounding this technology. One of the issues with barcoded ads today is where you find them: newspapers, arguably a dying medium whose subscriber base isn't necessarily composed of cutting-edge early adopters. So how can barcodes make their way to the people who actually use the web and other modern technologies? One company thinks they have the answer.

Enter Neomedia

Neomedia is ready for the barcode trend to take off. They've been around for a decade and have had the technology for reading barcodes with mobile phones in place for years. Now, thanks to the ubiquity of modern mobile phones, they are poised for success if this trend ever takes off. Their barcode scanning software lets you access mobile web content by scanning ads from print, packaging, billboards, and even broadcast media.

The Printed Out Web

No matter how tech savvy you are, there are still times when you simply must print out something from the web. Driving directions are a great example. Now imagine that your printout looked something like this (see below) - directions at the top with a scannable ad for a hotel at the bottom of the page:

That printout isn't a prototype, but a real ad available today from RandMcNally.com. The ad is made possible through NeoMedia's partnership with Format Dynamics, a company that works with web publishers and advertisers to help transform web pages into readable printouts which can then be monetized with ads. The company's "Clean Print" technology is a real-time dynamic reformatting engine that harvests a page's content and then produces a printed page in a coherent format without odd line breaks, cut off images, etc. Clean Print will also work no matter how the end user decides to print - whether "Ctrl + P" is pressed or a print button is used, the results are the same.

Any site using Clean Print technology can now include barcoded ads alongside their content. This is great for driving directions, but also for articles that tend to be printed out and shared, such as those from online news sites. (Don't believe it? Just look at the uproar over the RWW print button, for example). Below is an example of what that looks like. The article is from The Orange County Register's site and the ad is for Crocs footwear.

Since the partnership between NeoMedia and Format Dynamics is still brand new, there aren't many other examples just yet. But Format Dynamics is already serving ads and reformatting the printed web pages of approximately 80 web publishers, including Rand McNally, CareerBuilder, the San Jose Mercury News, the Denver Post, the Houston Chronicle, and a few others. In time, NeoMedia will extend their barcode offering to more of these clients.

How To Scan: NeoMedia's NeoReader

NeoReader is the barcode scanning software. It's not a separate piece of hardware, but software that runs on your phone. NeoReader currently works on iPhone, Java, Symbian, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile. The only missing platform is Android, but the company plans to include that at a later time. Even without Android, the company has managed to cover most of the smartphone market as well as many of today's standard phones via their Java offering. (You can see a full manufacturer's list here).

To download the application, just go to get.neoreader.com from your handset's web browser and follow the instructions. If your handset is not supported, you can still access the NeoReader program. Just bookmark the URL get.neoreader.com/go. This web page will let you enter keywords and barcodes in order to access the same content available to users of the mobile application. iPhone users can simply download the NeoReader application from the iTunes App Store.

Android has been announced but it isn't actually out yet, so we can't compare NeoReader to Android's barcode scanning apps like CompareEverywhere or GoCart. On the iPhone, though, NeoReader is not the only barcode reading app currently available - there are several to choose from. In function and feature set, the difference between most of those apps and NeoReader is minimal. Like many of those other iPhone apps, NeoReader also lets you build your own barcode if you so desire. You can create a barcode for any URL just by going to http://www.neoreader.com/code.html and entering in the URL you want to convert.

Make a Barcode:

The real difference between NeoReader simply comes down to the fact that NeoMedia is a business that's trying to make barcode scanning a reality...it's not an app put out by an independent developer. NeoReader already has a handful of sites where it can be used and over the coming weeks they will be able to add to their list as their partnership with Format Dynamics deepens.

Is This The Answer?

With the rising popularity of camera phones, smartphones, and better web browsers for surfing the "real" internet at higher 3G speeds, there's an improved chance for a technology like barcoded ads to take off. However, for it to really become truly successful a lot of advertisers and big-name companies will have to get on board and consistently offer barcoded ads for an extended period of time - not just try it once and then give up, claiming them a failure. In today's uncertain economy, the number of advertisers willing to take this chance may be low.

NeoMedia's partnership with Format Dynamics means they are able to offer a good selection of web sites where you can find the technology in use. That's a good start at least, but ultimately the technology will come down to consumers' willingness to interact with the real world in this virtual manner. The expectation behind this whole barcoded ad platform is that people will see the advertisement and then take an extra step to learn more about the product or service. Is that even how today's consumers interact with ads? In our media-saturated culture, most consumers run from ads, not the other way around.

Will adding barcodes make viewing ads a more engaging experience or will consumers continue to ignore ads like they do today? That's a hard question to answer with a technology so new and untested, but it's possible that, if done well, barcode scanning could work. The trick may be to provide an added value to the customer who takes the time to scan. That added value could be a discount, a free gift with purchase, or something else of a compelling nature to the potential customer. That could make barcode scanning the coupon clipping of the 21st century...and that might actually work. Scan to save. We would do it. Would you?

See also: The Scannable World, Part 1: Mobile Phones As Barcode Scanners
The Scannable World, Part 3: Barcode Scanning In The Real World

Discuss

Iterend, a new blog search and discovery engine, is entering a highly competitive market. It competes with Technorati, Google's Blog Search, Sphere, Icerocket, and many other smaller players. Iterend is trying to differentiate itself from the competition by putting a stronger focus on tracking memes, clustering results, and using tag clouds for navigation. While we mostly like Iterend's design and feature set, the search engine itself is not very useful yet, as the crawler is extremely slow and the index often only reflects stories that are more than 20 hours old.

Tag Cloud and Top Stories

Iterend indexes about 250,000 blogs. Once you log in, you are greeted by a very large tag cloud on the left side of the screen and a list of the top stories of the past 24 hours on the right. It is not quite clear how Iterend determines this list, but it simply seems to look at how often a story was linked to. Currently, this list is dominated by political stories.

The tag cloud is a bit overwhelming at first. To see all of it, you have to scroll down and it includes over 250 keywords.

Search

The search engine itself relies heavily on tag clouds as well. For every search, Iterend displays two tag clouds that allow you to drill down deeper into your search: one for related phrases and one for related categories.

If you search for "McCain," for example, Iterend will suggest searching for "Obama" or "Sarah Palin." This actually works quite well and allows you to filter your searches quickly and effortlessly. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed for every search.

Verdict

Iterend has a lot of potential. However, the company needs to make sure that its index is more up to date. Today, most blog search engines index a post within minutes after it is posted, so having a 20 hour delay simply takes away any reason to even start using this service - unless you are looking for old news.

Invites

Iterend gave us 1000 invites for our readers. Just follow this link and give it a try.

Discuss

Fabrication-on-demand service Ponoko launched a powerful new feature called Photomake today; now anyone can upload a photo of a drawn image and Ponoko will create a physical object based on that photo alone. This whole company is really fun but Photomake turns it into a generally accessible tool for those of us who aren't designers.

After uploading a photo of a drawing, users pick which of a list of materials they'd like their design created with and then Ponoko provides a cost for fabrication. The items aren't cheap but the experience looks fantastic. Check out the video demonstration below.

Ponoko is a relatively new startup, it launched this year, but according to a longer profile today on VentureBeat "sales are up 111 percent in the last month." How much does it cost? Making an attractive four bottle wine rack will run you $100, for example. Complexity and materials are the primary determinants of price.

It's hard not to love this sort of service. The read-write web is one thing, but when this same ethic spills out into tangible objects, it really gets the imagination stirring.

Discuss

Online study group community Cramster announced today that the company has raised a $3 million investment and after checking out the site, we can see why. This active, full featured and well design service looks really compelling for students and has a solid business model.

Members can participate in forums about homework, get quick answers to questions 24 hours a day and access explanations of problems from more than 200 of the most popular text books in 7 subject areas. There are free and paid membership levels at $10 per month and users deemed helpful by others can receive financial rewards like gift certificates.

The site has already got a very active community, with thousands of questions and answers posted on the boards. Subject quizzes can be generated automatically for practice, there are lecture notes and videos posted on the site as well. Support for scientific notation and images looks strong. We are very impressed.

Limitations

We did have a hard time viewing the videos. The topics are also limited to math and science, but we can see how that makes sense. The highest rated user on the site is one who has never asked a question, only answered thousands of other peoples' questions, and claims to be a monkey.

Joseph Weisenthal at PaidContent, who found the funding announcement first, thinks that study groups are best appreciated for being distracted from studying with social activity. That might be the case for many people, but there is clearly also a lot of interest in getting help to hard math and science problems on Cramster already.

All in all, the service looks great. With $3 million more in the bank, we expect to start seeing Cramster around a lot more. We wrote last month about 10 great apps for college students - we can certainly foresee this one making that list next year.

Discuss

When we first introduced you to Elgg two years ago, it was a new social networking platform whose focus was on e-learning. Since that time, the software has been rewritten and it has moved away from being strictly for educational use only. Today, the award-winning Elgg is one of the top open source social networking platforms available on the internet.

A little over a month ago, Elgg 1.0 was introduced to the world. In this newest release, several years in the making, the software has been improved from the inside out. It has a more attractive UI and design, for starters. But under the hood you'll find more changes like better plugin support, RSS and OpenDD views, and a new database schema.

We may have said that the next social networks would be powered by blogging CMS platforms like WordPress and Movable Type, but what we're really seeing is a shift towards making all web platforms more open and social experiences.

To that end, Elgg can help form the basis of a new generation of social networks. But their platform goes beyond just delivering a solution for the next web 2.0 hangout or social site, although that it a popular use for their software. The Enterprise 2.0 movement is also aided by Elgg as companies wanting to build and customize their own intranet-based social networks have begun to adopt the platform as well.

The Interview

We recently had the opportunity to follow up on our original interview with one of Elgg's founders, David Tosh. We talked about where Elgg stands today and what plans they have for the future.

How would you describe Elgg to someone who didn't know what it is?

Elgg is an open source social networking engine started by Ben Werdmuller and myself back in 2004. Elgg can be used by developers as a starting point from which to build out their own social applications (it handles common back-end functionality and has an extensive programming API), and out of the box as a useful social utility. This year, it was voted by a panel on InfoWorld as the best open source social networking platform 2008.

What's new with Elgg since we first spoke?

We have completely rewritten the Elgg core. This was necessary in order to future-proof the project, improve scalability and allow for greater customization. Over the past four years, we have found that one size really does not fit all, so we had to make sure Elgg was flexible enough to handle new demands being thrown at it, both now and in the future. The era of the monolithic social network is coming to a close; we want to make it easy for people to add social functionality into all kinds of applications.

Why did you move away from being a platform focused on education?

Although we've always had an educational base, a lot of users from other fields began picking up on Elgg. As a result, we were securing contracts to build custom networks on Elgg for groups that were not part of the educational circle, and feeding those developments back into the product. Gradually, interest in Elgg became greater outside of education, so we adapted to that change.

How does Elgg compare to its commercial competition?

With its new architecture and open standards at its core, we feel it is best placed to handle changing expectations in the social arena. It's a very competitive space, but a lot of products have just bolted social features on top of their existing systems - Elgg has social functionality built into the core and was designed from the ground up to support it. That allows us to create deeper features, and also plan ahead for new kinds of social applications. As the types of social applications and uses for them grow, we feel our approach will pay dividends.

Some employers are letting employees use Facebook at work now. Do you worry that will affect the number of potential customers for your product?

Not really. If anything, I think this increases the potential and opportunity. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc play an important role in bringing the concept of social technology to new audiences. For groups like us, who provide niche services, this is great. For example, companies try out Facebook and then start releasing that they want to improve their internal communications to be more Facebook-like; we can help them with that.

Why should someone consider Elgg for their network?

I think there are three main reasons: simplicity, extensibility and openness. The basic version of Elgg is deliberately very simple and clean. Our architecture allows you to easily extend Elgg's functionality to meet your specific requirements. Lastly, we fully embrace open standards such as OpenDD, FOAF, RSS, Open Social and OpenID, allowing you to interact with other applications.

Who is using Elgg today?

Elgg users range from sports networks to corporate companies, university intranets to school districts. There is a wide cross section picking up the software and applying it to their own niche. Increasingly, companies are also using Elgg to build social sites for their clients; we're keen to promote and support this.

What's in store for Elgg's future?

We have a couple of things in the pipeline:

• Firstly, we're going to launch an Elgg supporter scheme. This will give companies who are providing Elgg-related services the chance to form closer links with the core project.
• We are working on a new mobile intranet platform, powered by Elgg, that allows users to share status updates, photos, documents and media via MMS, SMS, email or the web. It also handles simple notes and shared tasks.
• We decided we needed a system within Curverider to improve our communication while on the move, and built it for our own use; it's been so successful that we thought other companies and organizations might find it useful as well. So far, the reaction from people we've shown it to has been extremely positive.
• All Elgg-powered services have the Open Data Definition built into their core, which allows for full import and export of users, content and connections as well as the ability to syndicate friends' activity in a distributed way.
• Lastly, we have just announced an advisory board that is packed with experts with excellent track records, in order to ensure Elgg and Elgg-powered services continue to develop and grow.

Discuss

This week we're looking at how religious organizations are using Web technology. Today's post looks at a blog that aims to "challenge misconceptions and stereotypical perceptions about Islam and Muslims worldwide". The site is Inside Islam and we caught up with lead blogger Kaitlin Foley today to find out more. For the previous posts in our series, check out our reviews of LifeChurch.tv (a Christian church) and Shalom Hartman Institute (a Jewish institute).

Inside Islam is a collaboration between University of Wisconsin-Madison and Wisconsin Public Radio. It is using 'new media' to improve communications between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Heavy Metal Islam

The blog's focus is clearly illustrated with the most recent post at time of writing: Mark LeVine and Heavy Metal Islam: The Fight Over What Islam Means. The post explains the story of scholar and professional musician Mark LeVine, who traveled across the Middle East "playing with and studying heavy metal bands in the area after the September 11 attacks in 2001." According to Foley's post, Mark LeVine's work uses "the universal language of music to articulate the diversity of Islam in contemporary times."

The post finishes with a selection of links to various media - Flickr, podcasts, the Heavy Metal Islam homepage, LeVine's blog, links to audio. There's also mention of a radio broadcast LeVine will be doing this Thursday, on 'Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders' - which is a radio program by one of the organizations behind the blog, Wisconsin Public Radio.

Incidentally, if you want a 1-line explanation of what Heavy Metal Islam is, this quote at the top of the HMI homepage - attributed to one of the founders of the Moroccan heavy-metal scene, Reda Zine - sums it up: "We play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal."

The trailer for a documentary called Heavy Metal in Baghdad, via InsideIslam

How Inside Islam Started

We asked Kaitlin Foley to tell us more about Inside Islam and how it got started. A recent graduate of University of Wisconsin-Madison, Foley has a degree in International Studies and Political Science. She focused on Islamic studies for her degree and so the blog is kind of an extension of that. She explained:

"The project as a whole is a product of University of Wisconsin-Madison, of which me, the blogger, and the pubic radio shows are only part of... in the end, we hope to have a wealth of resources that people around the world can access about Islam and Muslim culture worldwide. This includes digital stories, blogs, YouTube videos, music, and all other types of popular content on the web."

Foley told us that the response to the blog has been "positive from the Muslim community online." She said that it "seems to be an issue people are really concerned about and want to talk about in a new way." The Internet, said Foley, "is a way to talk about political, cultural and global issues in a democratic way." The blog's goal is to "create a dialogue and raise some debates about hot issues in a meaningful way."

The blog is closely linked to the radio show 'Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders', mentioned above. The first radio show to be broadcast is on tomorrow, about Heavy Metal Islam. The second show is October 30 on the topic of Muslims and social media.

The final question we asked Kaitlin Foley was: are you a Muslim yourself? She replied that she's not, although she said a couple of her supervisors are. She explained further that "even though I'm not Muslim, I think Islam is a big concern for anyone with a T.V. or internet access and [it's] an important way people understand the world."

Islam on the Web

Inside Islam is an interesting use case for a blog - it's using a two-way medium, along with new media tools like podcasting and Flickr, to open up discussion on a religion that, in this day and age, can be easily misunderstood.

For context, we must point out that Islam is already a popular topic in the blogosphere. We noted in a post in November that trend charts showed more Web activity about Islam than about Christianity. There is indeed an Alltop category for Muslims, which has a lot of blogs in it. Not to mention there are some web 2.0 blogs that cover the Middle East, including ArabCrunch and