2008 has seen a big change in the way the blogging community communicates with each other. In a nutshell, discussions have become very fragmented. There are two main reasons for this: firstly Twitter and its 140 character soundbites has become very popular among bloggers, and secondly FriendFeed has tipped as the lifestreaming aggregator of choice for many people. The upshot is that there are now many places where people can have online discussions. This has been a challenge to blog publishers, for whom comments are an integral part of the blogging experience.
Hitwise Intelligence took an interesting look at the breakdown of Yahoo's properties today. They come to the conclusion that, even if Yahoo sells off its search division, Yahoo's other properties probably wouldn't be too affected by this, as they get most of their traffic from Google's search anyway. Only Yahoo Image Search, Games, Maps, and News get most of their traffic from Yahoo Search.
RSS is magic and the things we do online are often beautiful - so why are all the interfaces for displaying the feeds of our activities so ugly? Enter Swurl, a visually stunning system for displaying a timeline of your activities on various sites around the web.
Developer Ryan Sit specializes in leveraging the visual to create new interfaces for data, his ListPic application lets users browse Craigslist by images. Just like Listpic creates a whole new experience for Craigslist, Sit hopes that Swurl will make interacting with lifestream data a much more visually enjoyable experience.
While quite a few mainstream users use RSS daily on their personalized homepages without ever knowing it, more traditional RSS aggregators are only slowly expanding beyond the early adopter crowd. Regator, which released a private beta today, is courting these mainstream users by giving them a very straightforward and easy way to browse RSS feeds while keeping the layout of more traditional RSS aggregators.
If you're a developer who loves to build mashups - especially map mashups - then you have to check out the library provided by Mapstaction. (And if you're end user, wait until you see the demos!) Mapstraction is library that provides a common API for various mapping APIs already in existence. This allows developers to use the Mapstraction API to build a mashup that supports nine of the major mapping providers including Google Maps, Microsoft's Virtual Earth, Yahoo Maps, and more.
In the ongoing copyright litigation between Google and Viacom, a judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York has ordered Google (PDF) to hand over data on every YouTube user, including username, the associated IP address, and a list of all the the videos that user ever watched.
In this lawsuit, Viacom is seeking more than $1 billion in damages because of alleged copyright violations on YouTube.
The music search engine SeeqPod has just announced a new service for music fans: "PodLists." Because of the massive amount of playable search results available on the SeeqPod service - 12 million at the moment and ever-growing - it can be difficult to find music that you like. Sites like Last.fm rely on social recommendations to help you find new artists, but SeeqPod's take is a bit different. Instead of launching social features, they'll be posting fresh, customized playlists to the site's homepage on a daily basis.
What can the plan be with Microsoft's purchase of hot startup Powerset? The 3-year old company, founded by Dr Barney Pell, recently launched a semantic search experience for Wikipedia.
It is doubtful that Microsoft bought the company just to enhance Live Search. Possibly the plan is to replicate the Wikipedia solution, then incorporate Powerset into Internet Explorer. In this post we look at what the thinking behind the acquisition might be.
We already knew that Mozilla had a record breaking day on June 17th when Firefox 3 was downloaded close to 8 million times, despite the download site not working for at least part of the morning. Now, Mozilla has announced that Firefox 3 has indeed made it into the Guinness Book of World Records with 8,002,530 downloads. Mozilla had set itself a goal of only 5 million downloads.
Microsoft today announced that it will release an all-in-one software subscription package that includes Live OneCare and Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007. Microsoft Equipt, formerly known as 'Albany,' will be sold in Circuit City stores starting mid-July. The subscription price for Equipt is set at $69.99 per year. Microsoft's regular price for buying Office Home and Student 2007 is around $150.
Identi.ca is a new microblogging service that launched today - but it's not just another also-ran. The service is an Open Source, CreativeCommons framework for a distributed network of federated microblogging services.
If you've become interested in the paradigm changing model of communication popularized by Twitter but have been frustrated by Twitter's frequent down time or other shortcomings - then Identi.ca could be for you.
SeeqPod Launches PodLists
Does Microsoft + Powerset Beat Google?
Identi.ca: May A Million Twitters Bloom