Today, searching through social media sites is much like the days of searching the Web before the advent of Google. Many of us are performing a series of loosely associated searches, and then aggregating them to try to get a glimpse of the bigger picture. To get a good cross-section of the conversation, we're running searches on Twitter and Ice Rocket, creating any number of Google Alerts, and building Yahoo! Pipes to sift through all the sources of information.

The perfect solution isn't there yet. And while no one has truly nailed "social media search," WhosTalkin is definitely a step in the right direction.

Sponsor

WhosTalkin, a social media search engine that recently came out of private beta, provides a simple interface that allows users to search a number of popular blogs and microblogging platforms, news aggregators, networks, video services, images, forums, and popular bookmarking and tagging services. Search results generally provide a decent overview of "who's saying what" about the particular search term, and WhosTalkin does a good job of crawling through a number of services in one fell swoop. Which is good.

The problem is that social media is far more dynamic than the Web of yesteryear. And, unfortunately, WhosTalkin is only good for searching while you're on the site. None of the pages are URL addressable - meaning you can't save or bookmark searches that you perform on a regular basis. Also disconcerting is the fact that there is no obvious RSS feed or alert mechanism to ping users when new results are found. And since the pages aren't URL addressable, it's impossible to run a service like Dapper against them to create your own RSS feeds.

That said, WhosTalkin is still useful, to a point. I'm still interested in using the service for research purposes or to gauge the current outlook on a particular topic. That has some value. But, it's easy to envision how much more compelling the service could become with some additional features. To become a truly valuable service, WhosTalkin is going to have to incorporate features that allow for the tracking of searches on an ongoing basis.

If you're looking for a quick glimpse at what's happening in social media - right at this very moment - or are interested in performing some one-off searches, WhosTalkin provides a great vantage on the current pulse of what's happening. It's a good first step in social media metasearch. But we remain hopeful that the service continues to add features that make it more useful for ongoing tracking of social media topics and trends.

To try the service and see what people are saying right at this moment - like the current opinion on this service or this post - visit WhosTalkin.

Web 2.0 is pretty cool - so cool in fact that it's got its own buzzwords and lingo that not everybody knows. Everybody has a lot to gain from participation in this new cultural phenomenon, though, so there's no reason why everyone shouldn't know the background on the lingo. We did a little research just to cover our own bases! We thought we'd share it with you.

Think you know where catchwords like FTW and Fail! came from? Think you know who came up with the phrase Web 2.0? Do you know what the first Rickrolled link claimed to be? We did some hunting around to find out - below are our best ideas for the history of these and other popular terms around the web these days.

Sponsor

FTW

FTW is most commonly understood as standing for "For the Win!" The Urban Dictionary says it entered popular culture via the TV show Hollywood Squares. The show featured two contestants playing a trivia based tic-tac-toe game where the squares had celebrities siting in them who "helped" answer the questions.

The final question to complete the tic-tac-toe was asked "for the win..." The show ran from 1966 through 1981 but there were several attempts to revive it.

Fail!

Now a one word sentence primarily used to mock, sometimes with a touch of sympathy, the prominent use of the word "Fail" is said to derive from 1998 arcade game Blazing Star. According to an article from this Fall in Slate, "its staying power comes from its wonderfully terrible Japanese-to-English translations. If you beat a level, the screen flashes with the words: 'You beat it! Your skill is great!' If you lose, you are mocked: 'You fail it! Your skill is not enough! See you next time! Bye bye!'"

See also the relatively new FailBlog.org, a daily collection of unintentionally funny images and videos with very simple captions.

Right: The cycles of history have a cruel sense of humor.

Rickroll

From the consistently obscene fringe message board 4chan to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade! Who would have ever thought a joke like this would go so far?

According to the Wikipedia entry on the phenomenon, the practice of telling someone you're linking to one thing and then linking instead to the Rick Astley video Never Going to Let You Down was originally based on a practice known as Duckrolling. The link would claim to be to a news item or some other thing but would instead take visitors to a web page containing a photoshopped picture of a duck on wheels. Hey look, it's a duck...with wheels.

The first Rickroll ever, Wikipedia dutifully reports, was a May 2007 link on 4chan that claimed to be to a mirror copy of the original trailer for the game Grand Theft Auto IV, which was otherwise unavailable.

4chan is also believed to be the origin of Lolcats.

Eating Our Own Dogfood

You often hear about technology companies "eating their own dogfood," which means using their own software to get work done. According to the book Inside Out: Microsoft in Our Own Words, the phrase came from Microsoft's Paul Maritz. Maritz had seen an Alpo dog food commercial where actor Lorne Greene told viewers that Alpo was so good he...fed it to his own dogs! Neither Greene nor Maritz apparently ate dogfood themselves, but Maritz did use the phrase in an email calling for Microsoft workers to use their own products more.

Dorky executives have felt like a little "edgy" using the phrase ever since.

Web 2.0

Many people think that Tim O'Reilly, book publisher and founder of the Web 2.0 Conference, coined the term Web 2.0. Last month O'Reilly mentioned in a PBS Science radio interview, though, that some one who worked for him actually came up with the phrase to articulate some concepts the O'Reilly himself had been discussing.

We did a little hunting around and got to what's apparently the truth. More than 3 years ago Tim wrote an article titled What is Web 2.0:
Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software where he says that it was O'Reilly VP Dale Dougherty who came up with the moniker in early 2004. (Photo of Dougherty, left, by David A. Mellis) How many of you got that trivia question right? At the time Dougherty was the Editor and Publisher of O'Reilly's Make magazine, so he was no stranger to invention.

So there you go. Now you don't have to be a wall flower at parties any more, for fear of not knowing the history of these five terms. Or are the conclusions we've drawn here incorrect? If you've got reason to believe so...speak up now!

The Google Chrome team keeps releasing updates to Google's browser on an almost weekly basis, but it is interesting that the latest version in the developer channel is now already being called 2.0. This comes just about four months after Google first released its browser to the public. This new version (2.0.156.1) is only available in the developer channel, but it already points at where Google is planning to go with this next version of Chrome, which, besides many new features, also includes a new version of WebKit and Google's own implementation of the HTTP protocol.

Sponsor

For us, this new version worked perfectly, but others had a different experience. If you want to try out the latest versions of Chrome, you can find instructions for how to subscribe to the development channel here.

New Features

Here are some of the features the team added since version 1.0 became available:

• new version of WebKit, with bugfixes and new features, including CSS gradients and reflections
• bookmark import from Google Bookmarks: this is still only a one-way street, so you can't actually sync bookmarks yet, but we would be surprised if somebody on the Chrome team wasn't working on this
• form autocomplete
• tentative support for Greasemonkey scripts: you have follow these instructions, and not every script will work (for us, only about 1 in 3 worked), but it's a start. Hopefully, Google will include a UI for managing user scripts in one of the next versions
• autoscrolling: works just like in IE or Firefox - just hit the middle button and drag the mouse
• full-page zoom: this resizes the text, as well as images and embedded objects
• better spell-check with the ability to quickly change languages

Dragging Tabs

One feature that stands out, because it is reminiscent of what Microsoft is doing in Windows 7, is the ability to dock dragged tabs. Now, when you drag a tap to the edge of your monitor, a small icon will appear and, depending on where on the page you release the mouse, the windows will be maximized, or be aligned with the respective edge of the monitor.

HTTP for Windows, Mac, and Linux

Google also included its own HTTP network code in this new version, which, according to the release notes, was necessary to move ahead with the Mac and Linux versions of Chrome.

Security

Google also introduced a new secure browsing mode that forces HTTPS (you have to invoke it by starting the browser with --force-https. Just last week, we bemoaned that Google itself often doesn't use SSL as the default for its own apps. By setting this mode, you can be sure that you will be (relatively) secure.

This week's RWW Live podcast show was on the topic of how startups can navigate through the choppy waters of the current economy. We've already posted today on a two year old life-story repository startup called Dandelife, which is struggling - although we were able to draw some lessons from that. But it's also good to look at the startups that continue to battle away. Our podcast guests were two examples of that - BrightKite and Zoho. Both were recognized by ReadWriteWeb in our annual end of the year awards: Zoho won 'Best Little Co' and BrightKite won 'Most Promising Little Co'. In the podcast they had some excellent advice for startups, so in this post we review some of those tips; and we invite you to add your own tips in the comments.

Sponsor

RWW Live host Sean Ammirati started by asking Zoho and BrightKite how they got their startups off the ground. Zoho replied that they started small, bootstrapping with one product. They started in the desktop business software market and within 6-12 months they had begun to generate revenue from that; then in 2003-04 they began to develop web apps, which they did using the revenue from the business software. So they've always managed to bootstrap using company revenue - they've not taken funding.

BrightKite started as a "nights and weekends" project that they submitted to TechStars, a small funding initiative similar to Y Combinator. TechStars provided mentorship, a bit of seed capital and generally got them off the ground - in return for some equity. BrightKite did a working prototype, then raised an angel round of $1M last year.

I then asked the two companies about how their product plan will be affected, if at all, by the economy downturn. I noted that Zoho has a wide variety of products in their Web Office suite, so for example do they plan to fold some of those into bigger products due to the economy? Zoho replied that they make money from their business applications, rather than their collaboration apps. So they have made it a priority to integrate their collaboration apps into the business apps over the coming year(s). They will also continue to add new apps, however those will be money-making business apps.

I put the same question to BrightKite: has their product plan changed due to the economy? BrightKite replied that it hasn't changed significantly, they were always planning to ramp up the marketing and do more partnerships this year. They also plan to introduce revenue drivers - e.g. location-based advertising and analytics for businesses. Generally the economy hasn't changed their revenue-generating plans too much, although it's perhaps brought it forward by a month or so.

In terms of success factors, Zoho mentioned that "constant innovation" has allowed them to keep ahead of the pack. In the online word processing space, there were around 17 competing apps when they launched Zoho Writer - but continually improving their product helped them keep ahead. Zoho has about 250 staff, so that has helped. On the other side of the staffing coin, BrightKite is a small 10-person team. They believe that being open and iterating on user problems is key for their success.

There are many more tips in the podcast, which we invite you to listen to below. Also let us know your own thoughts on not just surviving, but thriving, in this current economic environment.

Download MP3

Cat pic: fofurasfelinas

In March 2003, Rich Kaarlgaard wrote a great article in Forbes detailing how the coming decade was all about massive reductions in costs and prices, driven by technology. We had grown accustomed to Moore's Law driving down PC costs. Kaarlgaard pointed out that this was happening across the spectrum of the economy. He was right, but many of the effects were hidden by the credit bubble. When money is so cheap, costs rise. Now we are in for an even cheaper decade, and today's headlines are showing the way.

Sponsor

Selling to the Bottom of the Pyramid

Today's news from One Laptop Per Child was about layoffs due to difficulty in raising money. But the mission remains, and the core driver remains technology, as one of the commentors points out:

"You have done a great job so far, revolutionizing Moore's Law for X86 computing, initiating the industry-wide rush to sell netbooks in the developed countries, thus accelerating the shift to cheaper and lower-power computing.

"The next step I think should be shifting the PC and laptop to the ARM architechture. This would lower cost and lower the power consumption further. And it would accelerate also the industry-wide shift from the wasted CPU cycles and empty processing of X86 to the optimized embedded process and the complete removal of all bloatware from computers. How soon could XO-1.5 or XO-2 be ready with an ARM Cortex A8 core, running some Linux OS with a Sugar interface in collaboration with Google Android as software platform?"

OLPC is not the only outfit with this mission. In India, Novatium has the same mission, and it has a for-profit model. It has been pointed out regularly for a long time that selling to the "bottom of the pyramid" is a good business strategy. It is now more apparent that these strategies will impact developed markets as well. The current downturn will accelerate this as individuals and companies seek to reduce costs.

The Google Price

In manufacturing, we have the China price. In outsourcing, we have the India price. In software-as-a-service, we now have the Google price. Reading the Forrester report on the cost of managing email, what jumps out is how radically lower the Google price is: $8.47 vs. $20.32 for the lowest-priced alternative. Despite all the chants of "You get what you pay for," most businesses will take that differential pretty seriously. Google has set the new benchmark. Every vendor that sells for more will have to spend a lot of marketing dollars explaining why.

Skype on an Unlocked Mobile Device

The rumor (based on a broken embargo, it appears) that Skype Lite will be available on Android and Java-enabled phones gets us closer to the deal we all want: Skype on an unlocked mobile device. Like many people, I don't use a landline at work anymore. I use Skype and a mobile phone. So I am okay when in my office, my home, or a friend's office or home where I can open my laptop and use Skype.

But my mobile bills are way too high. I was intrigued by Validas' offer to reduce mobile bills by untangling their complexity. But I really want a more radical option, and Skype on an unlocked phone gives me that. I get free Skype-to-Skype and cheap Skype-Out calls wherever I have Wi-Fi. Wherever I don't, I use a pre-paid mobile calling card. No fixed costs. Big mobile bills... gone! Hint: don't buy shares in telephone companies.

Don't Worry Apple, There Will Always Be a Luxury Market

Aston Martins may not be selling so well today, but iPhones and Macs are flying off the shelves, and they are surely not cheap. Affordable luxury -- something that makes you feel good but does not really break the bank -- does well in a downturn.

But this is a small counterpoint to the massive main trend of cheaper products driven by both technology and the need to sell to the billions who are joining the global economy. Now, if we can only figure out how to enable billions to join the global consumer economy without doing worse damage to the environment, we will be in great shape. Come on Mr. Tata, what about an electric version of the Tata Nano?

Two year old life-story repository Dandelife seemed to have everything going for it. It launched to praise from some of the biggest tech blogs on the web, it built a wildly loyal user base and its company advisory board was stocked with some of the biggest names in social media. Apparently that hasn't been enough, though. Last night Dandelife founder Kelly Abbott announced that the software will be made open source this year, acknowledging that the company hasn't grown or made money and that he made some important mistakes from the start.

It's an interesting story that other entrepreneurs can learn from and Abbott has done a real service in opening up honestly about what's going on at Dandelife.

Sponsor

Dandelife's Strengths

The basic idea behind Dandelife is that it's a place to record your life story. You can read and comment on other peoples' stories, navigable by time-line, topic or story teller. A lot of people seem to be using the service as a time-line based social bookmarking account for things they find around the web. The site spoke to a universal human need, the need to be heard. Abbott says all that content did well in search engines, too.

When the company launched in the summer of 2006, it had a knockout team of advisors including the grand poo-bah of web design Jeffrey Zeldman, Userplane founder Mike Jones (who sold his company to AOL for $30-$40 million the next month), Bruce Livingstone (who had just sold iStockPhoto for $50 million months earlier) and a list of other luminaries. It was a great team.

Dandelife won a Webby Award in 2007. It made early moves in favor of data portability, tying to the once-celebrated Attention Trust and later implementing Attention Profile Markup Language (APML), the protocol developed by Data Portability Working Group co-founder Chris Saad.

The company got lots of attention. It got written up on Lifehacker, shared on Waxy Links and hit the front page of Delicious Popular.

What Went Wrong?

What went wrong? Apparently all those great backers didn't give Dandelife very much money. At least that's what's implied by founder Abbott last night when he said the site was terribly engineered because he was unable to afford to hire better developers. What's most important, though, is that Abbott says the site suffered down time and took up all his energy in fixing the back end. He's a marketer by trade, but now admits that he's spent almost no time marketing Dandelife. Feature-creep took over instead, he says.

No matter how hard I wanted the site to be successful, and no matter how good the pitch for Dandelife was, I always feared success. Staying small and non-profitable became an excuse for failure to scale. Why won't this site grow? I kept asking myself. But in my heart of hearts, I knew why. I was pouring all of my effort into product development and in particular finding and fixing bugs, that I had no time and no confidence in marketing the site.

Now Abbott says he's going to scale back on features, throw far more time into marketing the company and, most importantly, open source the code. "I think the Internet could use a thousand Dandelifes," Abbott wrote last night. He hopes that some of those new versions of the site will pay him to consult on implementation. That could work well.

Abbot's initial monetization strategy was to leverage the life stories of users (with their permission) in service of brand advertisers - to act as an advertorial farm-team of sorts. I reviewed the service on TechCrunch when it launched and said I thought that was creepy. The company even tried to trademark the term "lifecasting", and any time spent on that was time wasted, obnoxiously even.

It appears now that Dandelife never scaled up enough to be able to pull that branding plan off. Abbot said last night that it's a great site for "people who want to make a difference in the world." Presumably that's a different group than those who want to share stories about drinking Pepsi at a family picnic or looking great in brand name clothes when they went on a memorable first date.

People who like Dandelife like it a lot. There is probably a lot of room for long form personal story telling on the web. The lesson Abbott seems to offer, though, is that launching such a company, even with an all-star advisory crew, a lot of press and solid search engine pull, just isn't enough. Prioritizing quality engineering from the start and remembering to do marketing after the launch are at least as important.

Like every other innovative industry before it, Web 2.0, too, has developed its own language. Our friends over at the Royal Pingdom blog took a close look at the buzzwords around Web 2.0 today and found some interesting trends. Using Google Trends as the basis for their research, Pingdom, for example, concludes that searches for term 'Web 2.0' peaked in 2007 and have been decreasing every since. Some of the main terms of the Web 2.0 world like 'RSS,' or 'cloud computing' have also been on a steady downward trajectory, while 'blogging' is still holding steady.

Sponsor

On the other hand, terms related to social activities on the net like 'social media,' 'social network,' or 'microblogging' (thanks to Twitter) have seen a steady rise in searches over the last few years.

'Web 3.0,' however, seems to have peaked as a term to describe the next wave of Internet innovation before it even had a chance to happen.

For a the full list of Web 2.0 buzzwords, head over to the Royal Pingdom blog.

Conclusions?

We wouldn't want to draw too many conclusions from this list, as it is based on search terms, and as users get more familiar with these and start bookmarking their favorite sites, they will probably start using search less. Also, as these terms become household names, fewer users will look them up on Google.

In some ways then, we might be able to interpret the decline of searches for 'RSS' or 'cloud computing' as a positive thing, as users have replaced searches for these general terms with more specific queries.

Microsoft today released Microsoft Tag, its own barcode technology for mobile phones. For this, Microsoft developed its own High Capacity Color Barcodes which can store a lot more information than the QRCode or Datamatrix barcodes we have become familiar with. Microsoft is specifically targeting mobile users with these tags and has released scanning applications for most types of mobile phones, including the iPhone (iTunes link), as well as Windows Mobile phones, Blackberries, and Symbian S60 phones.

Sponsor

Microsoft's promo video describes Tag as 'instant entertainment,' and while that might be true if you have a low threshold for amusement, it is really more of a useful than fun application.

Do It Yourself

You create your own barcodes on the Tag web site and download them in various formats (PDF, WMV, and XPS). The site also lets you track how often your codes have been scanned, which sets it apart from most other online barcode generators.

Tags always need to include a title, but optionally, you can also set start and end dates for campaigns, secure them with passwords, add vCard information, phone numbers, or just plain text.

The vCard information might be one of the most useful applications, as you could put the barcode on your business cards, from which your contacts can easily import all your contact information to their phones.

Will it Succeed Where the CueCat Failed?

Of course, there is no dearth of barcode readers for mobile phones. Some, just like Microsoft Tag, only read the tags and take you to a destination on the web, while others, like Big in Japan's ShopSavvy for Android phones, focus more on providing other services like comparison shopping. Other apps like

A few days ago, we wrote about a research project that, once released, would allow you to access information about real-world places by simply aiming your camera at them. While Microsoft's tags are surely not even close to this, the project does have a lot of potential.

At the same time, though, we have seen too many similar projects fail to be too optimistic about this one (think CueCat in the late 90s). Now that cell phones with adequate cameras are standard issue, however, things might be different and Microsoft's format does seem to have advantages over QR Code thanks to its ability to store more information, though the real question will be if consumers are actually interested in this technology.

Note: For more info about barcodes and cell phones, also see our three-part series about the "Scannable World":

• The Scannable World: Mobile Phones As Barcode Scanners
• The Scannable World, Part 2: Scanning Your Web Printouts
• The Scannable World, Part 3: Barcode Scanning In The Real World

CC-licensed image of CueCat courtesy of Flickr user Denn.

Like to sing in the shower or in the car? Want to subject others to your incoherent warblings as if they were a real song? Microsoft Songsmith may be for you. And if you're a professional lyricist, musician, or someone with real musical talent? Songsmith may be incredibly helpful for you, too.

Sponsor

The technology is actually quite impressive. Songsmith takes a cappella vocals - no matter how disjointed - and interprets a musical melody to lay behind them. Meaning? Meaning that with no musical talent whatsoever, you can now compose, record, and share songs with whomever is willing to listen.

But what if you actually have talent? Songsmith could be of potential use to you, too.

"Songwriters can use Songsmith as an 'intelligent scratchpad' to work with new melodies, quickly turning your scratch recordings of new ideas into richer, deeper explorations. Musicians can also play instruments right into Songsmith, instead of singing."

No doubt a great deal of research went into the development of the product, and it probably has some very interesting potential applications. But, I must admit, after watching the promo video, I'm having a hard time clearing my head enough to figure out what those uses might be.

Who knows? This might be another one of those Seinfeld things.

Scoble has just posted an interview and demo with two researchers from Microsoft - who coincidentally also star in the promo video. They provide additional insight on the product and highlight some of its potential applications.

Interested users can download a trial version from Microsoft Research. The product is available for purchase for $29.95 US.

Something tells me that the American Idol tryouts just got a lot more interesting.

Just about everyone has been exposed to the concept of flashcards. Whether trying to study for a geography quiz or learning a foreign language, the method of using Q&A cards to train your brain to remember has remained a popular study method. But, the concept hasn't really made the leap to the Web, until now. Introducing Cramberry, the flashcards you know and love, only on the Web.

Sponsor

Granted, Cramberry is incredibly simple. The cards are fairly rudimentary, but they serve the purpose. Quite frankly, they're better than the scribbled notes on index cards that many of us used. And yet, Cramberry has the potential to be incredibly useful by taking a familiar technique and making it much easier to use.

After logging in, you will be prompted to create sets of cards with any information you want to study. Questions on the front, answers on the back.

Once the set is ready, you can begin flipping through the cards, testing your knowledge. Then, you can mark whether you got the answer right or wrong. All of this information feeds the algorithm, which serves up the cards in an order that helps you practice the topics that you're missing while keeping you refreshed on the topics you know.

But the true value of Cramberry is the fact that the service makes your flashcards accessible wherever you go. Use them while you're sitting at your desk, at the coffee shop, or even on your phone.

What if you don't want to build flashcards? Cramberry has just announced that they'll begin releasing a library of public cards in the not too distant future. Once available, you'll be able to choose from any number of topics on which you'd like to learn.

Again, a simple service. But sometimes, it's those simple things - like something as simple as saving your bookmarks to the Web - that provide the most value. If you're having trouble remembering some important facts, give Cramberry a try.

Sponsor

Overall, requests from the iPod touch increased from 18 million in July 2008 to 292 million in December. While traffic from the iPod touch grew at a steady clip over the last few month, a good part of this growth came, not unsurprisingly, in the week after Christmas. After the iPhone (10%), the iPod touch (4.7% ) is now the second most popular mobile device on sites that run AdMob's advertising. Overall, iPhone requests grew 86% since November.

Just looking at the smartphone market, Apple also continues to solidify its dominance. In America, the iPhone now accounts for 48% of all traffic to Admob's network, which is more than RIM (19%), Palm (9%), and Windows Mobile (15%) combined.

It's All About Usability

As we pointed out last month, Apple has created a user-experience that makes its users want to use the mobile web on its devices. It is probably safe to assume that most iPod touch users could easily have used their desktops or laptops to access the web instead, but for quickly looking up the news or reading email, the instant-on experience of a phone is often preferable over the more fully featured desktop experience.

At the end of last year we presented our list of the top 10 Semantic Web Apps of 2008. ReadWriteWeb reader Zoltán Andrejkovics wrote in to us afterwards, suggesting that we do a post looking at what Semantic Web apps we'd like to see emerge in 2009. Zoltán gave us 5 apps he wants to see this year, and we also asked our Twitter friends for their views (you can follow ReadWriteWeb on Twitter here).

We at ReadWriteWeb are tracking the Semantic Web space closely - so far we've identified 20 products (see our first 10, then 10 more) that we're paying particular close attention to. But we know there is a lot of opportunity yet for commercializing the Semantic Web, so we encourage you to add your wish list in the comments.

Sponsor

At ReadWriteWeb, we look for more commercial Web apps - whether they be consumer or enterprise. So here are 5 of those we'd like to see emerge and/or grow during 2009:

1. Microsoft makes a very bold play with Powerset technology and starts to challenge Google in search (despite Google's attempts to use semantic web technology, we'd love Microsoft to ramp it up in search - competition is good for consumers!).
2. Semantic Web advertising apps for publishers - we have our eye on Dapper MashupAds in this sector, but we'd like to see others take up this challenge too.
3. Semantic apps for managing your finances - makes connections between transactions, things that you wouldn't normally pick up.
4. Semantic apps for health industry - there are many opportunities here, but in general there is much the Semantic Web could do to organize the maze of data in the health indsutry.
5. A Personalized Memetracker - Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera would be astonished if this happens, but we'd love to see a product that can give a Techmeme-like organization and layout to one's RSS feeds. So at a glance, you can see which stories in your own set of RSS feeds are hot and who's linking to them. Whether Semantic Web technology can achieve that, we don't know ;-)

Zoltán Andrejkovics, who suggested this topic, is a PhD student at Corvinus University of Budapest and his 5 wishes as a researcher are:

1. Smart notes; easy to find/browse notes, using NLP search.
2. Smart RSS; automatic article-collecting app based on my own interests.
3. Mind writing; using not only words, but "thought" objects, that the NLP engine puts into words.
4. Assistant; "my mirror", learns from my words, behavior on the net, and supports my work, handles calendar, etc.
5. Smart bookmarks; works like smart notes.

Here are some reactions from RWW readers on Twitter (it was very short notice before this post was published, so if we missed you please add your wish list to the comments):

superphoebe: "I'd love to see more semantic blogging tools like Zemanta, but with more sources, really great search and a super simple dashboard."

Marcelo Sánchez: "Zigtag for bringing real semantic tagging and Freebase as the next Wikipedia"

garlin: "I'd like an app that uses semantic tech to identify/analyze the political bias in a particular article/piece of writing."

kevin grandia: "would love to see a better way of submitting content to conversion services like Calais."

Rama Mamuaya: "language based search engines like Hakia or Powerset should be rising fast. Should evolve from search engine, to answer engine."

Jean-Jacques Halans: "mobile safari reading microformats, for adding to calendar, contacts, lookup address on map"

Stephen Edgar: "More on the Semantic Wiki app's and API's such as http://tinyurl.com/27vnno"

Chris Saad: "my hope is to see APML import AND export from more apps ;)"

Tell us your Semantic Web App Wish List for 2009.

If you've ever wondered how the Internet was born, but can't be bothered reading a whole book on the subject, check out this short animated documentary from Milah Bilgil. Entitled History of the internet, it does a great job explaining time-sharing, file-sharing, arpanet and internet. The video uses a new type of info-graphic called PICOL icons, which will soon be made available for free on picol.org. PICOL stands for Pictorial Communication Language - it's a project that aims to create "a standard and reduced sign system for electronic communication." PICOL is free to use and open to alter.

Sponsor

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

Phishing, the highly illegal scam of tricking people into revealing their logins and passwords by creating fake emails, Twitter messages, and/or websites, does not actually make phishers a lot of money. A new paper (PDF) by Cormac Herley and Dinei Florencio from Microsoft Research argues that the basic laws of economics still apply to phishing. As phishing becomes easier, and as 'phishing kits' are being sold for less than $100, the actual income for each individual phisher has to come down. Phishing has become a "low-skill, low-reward business."

Sponsor

While, as the authors point out, the media has portrayed phishing as an easy (and illegal) way to make money, the reality is that too many phishers have joined the fray and that the income per phisher has been greatly depressed because of this.

Phishers typically sell the logins and passwords they have harvested through their scams to other criminals online, who can then easily commit identity theft.

Losses from Phishing Have Been Exaggerated

The authors also argue that the economic losses from phishing have been greatly overstated. Herley and Florencio argue that the numbers don't 'survive basic sanity checks,' yet are widely quoted. At the same time, these mythical numbers lead more phishers into the business, which then depresses the per person income even more. According to PayPal's chief information security officer Michael Barrett, phishing "is not even in the top five threats" that could cause losses at PayPal.

Why Phishing Will Continue

The paper, however, also points out that this lack of revenue does not mean the end of phishing. Phishers, the authors argue, are not necessarily making rational economic decisions. Instead, their vision is clouded by by hopes of 'hitting the jackpot' (even when revenue is going down), and a constant barrage of reports of 'easy money' that will lead phishers to believe that revenue will go up again. Also, because phishing is generally considered to be very 'easy,' a constant stream of newcomers will replace the retired phishermen. The authors note that this cycle can only be broken through providing better information about the economic reality of the phishing business to potential phishers.

(hat tip to Steve Ragan at the Tech Herald)

CC-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user ToastyKen

Our favorite URL shortening service, Bit.ly, has just released a Firefox plug-in that you'll probably want to add to your browser. It lets users hover over shortened URLs from a wide variety of services, including TinyURL, and see the resulting full URL - as well as how many people have clicked through the shortcut.

Along with Bit.ly's semantic analysis of destination pages, the data unearthed by this new plug-in holds a lot of promise. The plug-in also does some handy tricks on Twitter. It's not perfect yet, but it holds a lot of promise.

Sponsor

We profiled Bit.ly when it launched in July and recommended using it for URL shortening because it makes use of all the valuable data that other URL shorteners leave unused.

The clickthrough data is great to see, but it's not without some serious shortcomings. Bit.ly queries a long list of URL shortening services' APIs to get traffic data and some of them don't update very frequently. There's also a lot of phantom clicks showing up; the company believes they've found a 3rd party app that's partially loading the destination pages and inflating the numbers, but we'll see if they can do anything about it. For now this data is better for determining the relative popularity of a shortened link than it is for literal numbers.

Twitter users will like the extension because hovering over any username there makes the user's information pop-up. That works quite well and is very useful. It's a fast way to see who someone is talking to in a conversation on Twitter.

The moral of the story here is that in little things like URL shortening, there's a whole lot of valuable information and room for innovation. We're glad that Bit.ly is moving to take advantage of that and we look forward to seeing what still other people will do with the data once it's stockpiled and made available by Bit.ly for further development.

You can get the Bit.ly extension for Firefox here.