The most recent of the always interesting Pew Internet and American Life reportswas released today and offers some interesting statistics concerning children online and their experiences being contacted by strangers. The gist of the results is this: 11% of girls reported that they had experienced uncomfortable or scary contact by strangers online, that number was significantly higher than for boys and many respondents felt stranger contact and the corresponding risks were a "cost of doing business" as a user in online social networks. The sample size of the survey was 935 and a big grain of salt is required - the write up says that stranger contact can include "a range of direct and indirect communications, including but not limited to: social networking site friend requests, spam email, or comments on a personal blog or photo sharing site." Spamemail? None of the results are shocking, but here are the most significant numbers:39% of girls online and surveyed report having been contacted by someone with no connection to them or their friends.24% of boys surveyed said they had experienced stranger contact online.27% of girls who reported any stranger contact said they had experienced stranger contacts that made them scared or uncomfortable, whereas 15% of boys said so.Among all girls surveyed, 11% reported uncomfortable stranger contact. That number was %4 for boys.The authors of the report said that teens typically felt that stranger contact was a "cost of doing business" in online social networks. It's also worth asking whether feeling uncomfortable or scared is an unacceptable event or whether it's an important survival tool, an emotional signal of danger and a better sign than not feeling uncomfortable in the face of a real threat.I asked Anastasia Goodstein, author of the excellent teen oriented blog YPulsefor her thoughts on the study and this is what she told me."What should give parents and educators a reason to breath easier is that most teens are ignoring this contact and only 7 percent reported that these interactions made them feel really scared or uncomfortable.The key take away is that teens don't want to interact with adults on social networking sites unless you're members of a group like a video gaming group on MySpace. They are there to talk with their friends, most of whom they know in person. So if a predator approaches them and says something sexual or creepy, most teens just ignore, delete, block and hopefully report them to the site admins."I would ad the following. Considering the percentage of women and girls in this world who have been subject to abuse by adults and other children and considering how often that abuse is received from a family member or family friend - these statistics are further evidence that inappropriate stranger contact online is significant but receives a disproportionate amount of attention in light of the relative size of the problem.Ask any but the most ardently anti-feminist women you know and they will likely tell you that any environment where only 1 out of every 10 women have felt uncomfortable or scared is a strikingly safe place in this world.While some parents may feel a zero tolerance policy on creepiness is important, this survey indicates that actual experiences and beliefs held by children are different. In the vast majority of cases, kids are tough enough to keep themselves safe on the open web.

  Taptuis a new kind of search engine for mobile phones, being launched today at the Mobile 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. Taptu uses a new technique which they call "Social Assisted Search"(SAS) - it combines algorithms with human feedback (from which it derives "social relevancy scores") to deliver the results. Taptu's aim is to enable users to search and find useful content "in 10 taps or less." Taptu CEO Stephen Ives claims that for other mobile search services it “takes an average of 30 taps and scrolls and two-and-a-half minutes to get to good results." The other notable feature of Taptu is that it includes rich media - e.g. playable audio and video. Here's an example:In the Mobile Launch Pad Segment which I'm watching as I write this, CEO Stephen Ives says that Taptu has special algorithms catered to mobile. He says they find "the best mobile friendly results".The first public version of Taptu, being launched today at http://taptu.mobi, focuses on music and fact-finding. However expect more categories to be added in the coming months. The first release is optimized for 20 popular handsets from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola - and the iPhone. Taptu is also releasing a Facebook application today, called Music Wall. It's powered by the same search engine and allows Facebook users to find music on the web, add to their profile and share with their friends. The company says that future releases will include "a unique social network to mobile integration."

  As noted last week, a group of startups are launching today at Mobile 2.0. Here are the first lot:heysanheysandescribes itself as a "mobile meebo" - it's a meta IM service for mobile phones. It is mobile browser based and works on the iPhone. The service is free and features include one single buddy list and a chat conversation view. They launched in April 07, a product of the YCombinator program.TaptuSee our full reviewof this product, a new type of mobile search.MippinMippinconnects mobile users to their favorite web content, which for mobile means the freshest content optimized for small screens. It has a search function (although a search for "mobile2.0" didn't discover any R/WW posts), and if you find a good story you can share it - via services like Twitter. It also allows you to publish content.Update:Prashant Agarwal from Mippin comments: "hey richard, I searched for "Mobile2.0" when I did my demo. But if you search for "Mobile 2.0" you guys come up. Stupid, I know, we're working on it."Mobile AnalyticsMobileResearchis a mobile data company; it sells data feeds, does phone testing, etc. They've done a lot of work on device targeting. The Mobile Analytics product is a stats service for Mobile Web, launching in January. Currently the service is in private beta testing.

  I'm at the second annual Mobile 2.0 eventin San Francisco. Rudy de Waele of mTrendsstarts with an overview of Mobile 2.0: an all-IP environment and application mashups are two features. Rudy has been a guest author on Read/WriteWeb before and his Understanding Mobile 2.0post from December is one of the best introductions to mobile 2.0 that you'll find. Also see: Mobile 2.0 Startup Ecosystem(Sept '07).Next up is Tomi Ahonen, author and Mobile blogger. His latest book is called 'Digital Korea', about how South Korea established itself as a technology leader. His talk today is about mobile social networking and communities - in particular the business opportunities in Mobile 2.0. Tomi Ahonen, photo by Rudy de WaeleTomi calls mobile "7th mass media", which he says "is as different from the Internet as television was to radio" - he's referring to things like user experience and business opportunities. His definitions of mass media: Radio was 4th, TV 5th, Internet 6th and Mobile 7th. He says mobile can do everything the previous 6 media can do, including interactivity and search of the Internet. But mobile is different from the previous 6 -- he says mobile is "the first personal mass media", it's always on, always carried, has built-in payment model, it's a creative tool at point of creative impulse and gets the most accurate audience info. He says mobile is "a far superior media experience" than the previous 6 mass medias.He says mobile apps can be "magical" and discusses an example from Japan - a cameraphone OCR translator. It's from a Japanese company called MediaSeek; the product is called Kamera Jiten, and it allows cameraphone users to turn their device into a translator.Business Opportunities in Mobile WebTomi then outlines some opportunities: e.g. mobile books (M-Books) are an $82M business in Japan. In Japan and South Korea, there are big opportunities for revenue - e.g. 54% of Japanese mobile phone users consume ads - and what's more 44% of them have clicked on interactive ads. Tomi says hat "advertising is becoming content", because it is relevant to mobile users. While he says this isn't a radical new idea (e.g. MTV videos in the early 80's were essentially advertisements of music products), it is something we need to adapt to more in the mobile Web era.He talks of a new company called Blyk, which launched 24 Sept in the UK. Blyk is a new mobile network for 16 – 24s that's funded by advertising - according to the Blyk blogit's "an invitation-only mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) that links young people with brands they like and gives them free texts and minutes every month." Tomi says Blyk is a company to watch and emulate.He says the big brands (Coca-Cola et al) will be present in the upcoming mobile social networks. Cyworld is an early example of this.Flirtomatic, a UK flirting service from May '06, is another good example of a mobile/social service. It gets half its income from ads, and half from personalization and gifts. Indeed the company abandoned their original subscription fee business model because of those other models. Flirtomatic is now one of Britain's leading florists, according to Tomi.In summary, an excellent talk by Tomi and I learned a lot about the opportunities in the Mobile Web world. His next book btw is on the topic of the 7th Mass Media - some of the content in his talk today was from that book.

  Ad network AdBriteannounced this morning that they have begun selling full-page ad units of the sort that you've no doubt seen on some of the bigger, more old-school web sites like PCMag and the New York Times. Now you too can interrupt your readers' time with a full page ad in the middle of their time on your site. Unlike the standard full page ads, though, the AdBriteunits aren't passive Flash commercials - they are like an iframe or a redirect directly to the advertiser's live, interactive website. Advertising pays the bills, and thank goodness for it, but I usually find these kinds of ads cause to feel pity for the website owner running them; do they have to hit me over the head with it? It's certainly a better ad type than those wretched double underline link ads.While the self-publishing revolution brought on by blogs was supposed to challenge the push-advertising model as well, it seems that push-advertising will not go down without a fight. I expect that many bloggers will welcome AdBrite's new full-page ads. You can test out the unit and see how it works at www.adbrite.com/fullpagead.Winksite Launches Mobile Ads with 100% Rev ShareIn related advertising news, mobile page publishing service Winksitehas launched an advertising feature that lets publishers retain 100% of ad revenue for either AdSense or AdMob mobile ads. That's a formula also being used by Facebook ad network Lookery, a new company founded by serial entrepreneur Scott Rafer. Rafer is the chairman of Winksite.In your browser or on your phone - the ads are coming. Cynicism aside, it's a good thing for publishers to be able to make a living. We'll see if all the rhetoric about new advertising models is just hot air.

  The Wall Street Journal reportsthat Discovery Communications will be purchasing online information portal HowStuffWorks.comfor $250 million. This would be Discovery's largest Internet acquisition to date. The company purchased environmental-focused blog Treehuggerearlier this year for a rumored price of around $10 million.HowStuffWorks has a global audience of 11 million users per month, according to the company, says the WSJ. Discovery, meanwhile, reaches 1.5 billion viewers globally with its network of over 100 cable channels. Initially, Discovery plans to integrate video content from its massive library into the HSW web site -- which has already begun to happen. The How Shark Attacks Workand How Hybrid Cars Workpages, for example, now include Discovery Channel-branded video clips."Our goal is to build the ultimate multimedia experience for people who want to learn about the world we live in," wrote HSW founder Marshall Brain today of the acquisition. The purchase also includes other properties controlled by HowStuffWorks, according to the Wall Street Journal, including a map database.

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/NewsGator_and_Bloglines_Join_APML_Workgroup';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Web users interested in personalization, privacy and increasing sophistication in their applications take note: the Attention Data spec APML (Attention Profiling Markup Language) gained substantial momentum today with the announcement that two of the long-time leaders in the RSS reader market, NewsGatorand Bloglines, are joining the official APML working group. Nick Bradbury, RSS innovator par excellence, will represent NewsGator in the organization. GM Eric Engleman will represent Bloglines in the group. Bradbury wrote this morningthat NewsGator's FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and Newsgator Inbox products will all soon support both APML export and import. Once that happens users will wonder what's taking everyone else on the market so long to do something so logical themselves.Attention Data is one of the concepts online with the most potential - and the most communication struggles (look how long this post is, for one thing!). Adding NewsGator and Bloglines involvement to the existing support for the movement indicates that things could start shakin'.What is This Stuff?Your Attention Data consists of all the information online about what you read, write, share and consume. Your Attention Profile is a very rich resource that vendors want to get their hands on (in order to target ads more effectively, for example) and that could open up a world of possibilities if you had easy access to it all yourself.What is APML? The spec's website explains it like this: "APML allows users to share their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows the exchange of reading lists between News Readers. The idea is to compress all forms of Attention Data into a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests."When you're able to offer up some or all of your Attention Profile to a new website you join, you could receive personalized recommendations immediately, for example. For a more extensive introduction to APML see this post by Elias Bizannes.BackingAdoption to date has been minimal. APML working group co-founder and chair Chris Saad's company Particlsuses it and his related service called Engagd(Saad says think AideRSSfor APML - cool!) is used by lifestream aggregator Dandelifeand APML publisher Cluztr. IMified announced todaythat their alerts product FeedCrier now supports APML.Somehow, though, Saad has been able to assemble a group of industry luminaries to work on APML. He's a high-energy visionary who lives in Australia - perhaps that helps him avoid the personality conflicts that are believed to have plagued similar efforts to move the Attention conversation forward. The APML working group includes Danny Ayers, Chris Messina, David Cancel from Compete, Steve Williams from Digg, Daniela Barbosa from Dow Jones and quite a few others. It's an impressive list that should beable to build a solid standard and help drive it to market.The Bigger PictureBloglines first mentioned APML in its recent announcement that it would be supporting OpenID and the cross-application authentication protocol OAuth. Just like with OpenID - it's one thing to publish to APML, it's another to allow users to import data into your application and it's another thing still to make these standards easy and prominent for your users to take advantage of.It's great that the RSS focused companies that have are joining the cause to work this all out - but where are Google, Amazon and Netflix? They would provide a lot of energy but could throw around a lot of weight in decision making. (Attensa, the most Attention focused feed reader for the past few years, wasn't available for comment at blog posting time.)As Alex Iskold wrote in an Attention Economy overviewhere at Read/WriteWeb,"It is certainly a step in the right direction, but it is not rich enough to capture semantic attention. For example, there is no concept of a book or a movie, the attention is represented as a set of tags. Such approach would make it impossible to build specific filters for things like books and movies."Furthermore, as we discussed here in our coverage of the OAuth draft standard, which would make mashups much easier to create than ever before, good services are ultimately more important to users than standards compliant services.ConclusionToday's announcements are big - but there's a long way to go. This is obviously a complicated issue that some people are highly involved with and the rest of the world probably doesn't know much about yet. We soon will though - many companies are already making huge sums of money off of our attention data. Someday soon we may be able to use it for our own purposes as well.

  This is a guest post by TK Kenyon, author of the bookRabid.digg_url = 'http://digg.com/business_finance/Internet_Marketing_for_Novel_Writers';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Writing, especially fiction writing, is a tough business to get into and a tougher one to stay in. Generally, neither authors nor publishers make a significant profit until an author’s fifth novel is published. Most of the time, the majority of the meager money that publishers put into publicizing books goes toward review copies and the usually unproductive author tour. How many books do first-time authors sell? Over 195,000 new novelsare published by traditional publishers in the U.S. every year. Of those, 70% sell fewer than 500 copies.Yikes.To be in the other 30% of authors, you must seize every promotional advantage you can, especially by using the web and other new media. My first novel, Rabid, sold out of its first print run of 10,000 copies in under two months and is currently chewing through its second print run, which is better than average.To sell your book, (1) inform people that you and the novel exist, (2) interest readers enough to buy your book, and (3) build a relationship to keep them coming back for more.For all this, the Internet is the perfect medium.InformTo announce your presence to the world, first you blog. Before your book is published, start your own blog or blogs on subjects related to your book, especially controversial themes or subjects that people want to know more about on an easy, free blog host like Blogger/Blogspot, Livejournal, or Xanga. Join blogs. Be a guest blogger. Trade blog posts with other bloggers. Many small blogs and blogger networks, including those that you start or join and co-op blogs, allow you to write one blog post and then cross-post to them all, which means far more bang for your time and typing buck. Some blog networks also feed into search engine news services, which is an added publicity bonus.Personally, I have a science blog, Science for Non-Majors(general science essays including genetic engineering of food animals, opinions about recent research in autism and Alzheimer's Disease, and why snot is slimy,) and participate regularly in co-op blogs like Criminal Minds at Work(for authors of crime novels, as Rabidhas both a murder and a trial in it,) and The Write Type, plus one at my publisher'swebsite, and blogger networks Bloggernews.net and Opednews.com.Writing guest articlesfor newsletters, print, e-magazines, and other blogs is one of the best ways to reach new readers. Articles for big blogs and e-magazines, such as this one or Bookslut, are generally exclusive. Don't cross-post these, though you can link to the post from your other blogs with a teaser about the article. Query blogs via email with a paragraph about the topic of your article and why you should write it. Find popular places to post by using tools like Technoratior PageRank on the Google Toolbar, which is also an indication of popularity -- a higher number is better. Statsaholicand Alexaare other sources for traffic information that you can utilize.If you have the time to commit to writing several articles per week for only one site, Aboutis competitive but lucrative. Blogcritics is an excellent site, though less remunerative.Literary journals, especially e-journals, are excellent places to publicize. Excise self-contained nuggets out of your novel and submit them. You can also write stand-alone prequels, sequels, or exquels to your novel. Lists of literary journals, such as this one at Poets & Writers, abound.Social networking sitesare also great places to up your profile ante. Wikipedia has a good but incomplete list.A page at MySpace.comis the minimum. You can cross-post your blogessays on MySpace blogs, too. Add friends, join groups, and aim for 1000 friends as your first goal, then 5000, then 10,000.Goodreadsis a must-visit social networking site for authors. It's similar to MySpace except that it's geared toward bibliophiles -- a target-rich audience. Add friends, join groups, and post book reviews.Gatheris a community of writers and is another great place to make friends and turn them into readers by cross-posting your blogs and essays.Once your book is added to Amazon, enroll in the AmazonConnectauthors' program. You can post blogs, announce book tour dates, and connect with people who have purchased your books in the past. Your posts show up on your book's page.Forums and newsgroupsare the great underground for authors. Make a list of topics, especially controversial ones, in your novel, and search YahooGroups, GoogleGroups, and search engines for "forum" plus your topic. Post to the introductory thread with details about your book, then respond to other people's posts, and cross-post any topically related blog posts as thread starters. Include your book's title in your sig file, but don't actually advertise your book as that will likely just get you branded as a spammer. As long as your posts are on topic, helpful, thoughtful, and informative, people will visit your signature links. Forums are good places to enjoy yourself while "working." Caveat: trolls lurk under these cyberbridges, avoid getting involved in any flame wars.Where to get ideas for blog essays:news items (write an opinion piece, not necessarily contrary, and link back to the source article), forum posts (on a discussion thread, when you write a long answer to a post, copy/paste your answer, tidy it up, and post it on your blogs), your characters (write short stories about them, which you can then submit to literary journals, or do "interviews" with them, which is always an amusing exercise), or questions that people ask you about your book.InterestAfter you inform people that you and your book exists, give them more information. Seventy percent of readers who are thinking of buying a book by a new author search the Internet before they buy.The first thing you should do when you sign your book contract, if you haven't already, is buy your name as a web domain address. You might want to buy the dot-net and dot-org versions as well as the dot-com, because if you don't, someone else will.So what do you put on your web site? First and foremost and as always, content is king. Readers want to know more about you, your book, subjects in your book, writing your book, excerpts from your novel or other short stories, and your characters. Don't just slap up a couple sales pages.For example, my own website, TKKenyon.com,includes a bio about my scientific work (virology and neuroscience) as well as fiction writing, essays on the craft of fiction writing, and about subjects that are themes in my novel, and more about the characters in my first novel, Rabid. Most people want to know more about two of them: Dante the tormented Jesuit Catholic priest, and Leila the wild graduate student.Republish essaysthat you hold the e-rights to on your website. Link to others and to your blogs. Include a few pictures of yourself but nothing that will overly interest a stalker. Write content for the site that includes important key words and optimize your pages for search engines, which includes naming pages using commonly searched words that are also subjects of the essay and ensuring that the links between pages work. Add content frequently. Include a way to email you (important for building an email list, see below,) and a way to purchase your book immediately. To do that, join an affiliate program, such as from Amazon.com, BN.com, or Powells.com.BuildAfter you've found someone and sold them your novel, sell them the next one by building a relationship with them. As any MBA will tell you, the easiest customer is the repeat customer. To do this, build an email list.Anyone who emails you, write them back and add them to your emailing list. When you start out, you can do mass emailings to your friends, but as you get bigger you should have an opt-in email list. You can collect email addresses from people at bookstore signings if you buy a little $2 bag of truffles and have a drawing, no purchase required. (Note: if you require the purchase of your book to enter the raffle, your contest falls under state lottery and gambling laws, and you don't want that.) Send out at least a couple newsletters each year and make sure there is a way for people to remove themselves from the newsletter so you are in compliance with anti-spam laws. Definitely make use of your email distribution list to announce the pre-sale and sale of your next book.AmazonConnect, mentioned above, is a great way to contact people who have bought your book from Amazon.com. In addition, AmazonShorts is a program where you can post short stories about your novel's characters, or other short stories, 2000-10,000 words in length, and sell them on the cheap. While it will not provide retirement income, it is another way to introduce new people to your writing or update them on the further adventures of your charaters.On your website, add an address where your readers can send you snail mail (like a PO Box, not your street address) and send you a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Then, send them a personalized, signed bookplateto stick in their book. Use large, 2"x3" or larger, printer-label stickers, and write a quick note and sign them.So that's how to use the Internet to rise above the fray: find readers, give them information, and build relationships with them. In-store book signings sell only a few books and publishers may or may not allocate much in the way of publicity funds and manpower to first-time authors. Your own efforts on the Internet can make a dramatic difference in whether or not your novel succeeds.Image credit: Notebook/coffee photo by Lost in Scotland.

  Sponsor:Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feedor by email.Web NewsNewsvine Acquired By MSNBCThe week started with some big M&A news in the Citizen Journalism space - Newsvinewas acquired by MSNBC, the Microsoft/NBC joint venture, for an undisclosed sum. Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson said that "Newsvine will continue operating independently, just as it has been since launching in March of 2006." He also indicated there would be little change in the features of the site -- which is great news, because in our review of Newsvine in July, we noted that Newsvine "is probably more advanced in its design than other CJ [Citizen Journalism] sites, often trying new things and design techniques." Indeed we can't wait to see how MSNBC integrates some of the Newsvine features, which Davidson said will occur: "Over the next few years, Newsvine technology and content will make its way onto msnbc.com, and vice-versa where it makes sense."Google Acquires Microblogging Service JaikuThis week Finnish short messaging and microblogging service Jaikuwas acquired by Google. That Google bought this competitor of Twitter, the service founded by Blogger founder Evan Williams, instead of Twitter is notable. Jaiku may be stronger on the mobile platform than Twitter and probably came at a much lower price. Google has been rolling up no end of very young mobile services; while the comparison with the Dodgeball acquisition, which ended up going nowhere, is inevitable - we think there's a lot more going on this time around. For one thing, Jaiku will now have access to scaling that Twitter could desperately use. YouTube Videos Coming to AdSenseThis week Google announced YouTube integration with AdSense. Selected YouTube videos will be available to AdSense publishers and will appear wrapped in banner ads. We think there's a whole lot of potential here. Though cynics have said that there's little hope for video outside YouTube, small video ad networks insist that there's a growing, thriving ecosystem of niche video sites just waiting for more and better content and ads.In other YouTube news, YouTube Videos have also been added to Google Earth. Geotagged YouTube videos will now be viewable in a featured content layer of Google Earth.MySpace App Platform Coming SoonMySpace is set to launch its 3rd party developer platform in just a few weeks. R/WW's Marshall Kirkpatrick was somewhat skeptical of the news, writing that "things are really changing at the industry leading social network. By this time next year you'll be getting spam from MySpace applicationsand be running to shut off your account altogether. If you feel embarrassed perusing the Facebook apps directory ("yes mom, these are my peers, this is the new frontier - let's send some 'booze mail!'"), you'll feel nauseas when you see the MySpace apps directory."In other big social network platform news, Read/WriteWeb heard from a couple of reliable sources that social network Bebois about to announce a developer platform very soon too. Although this news didn't seem to interest the US-focused tech blogosphere, Bebo is one of the largest social networks in the world and is above MySpace and Facebook in some parts of the world (e.g. it is number 1 in the UK). So along with the MySpace news, this is another significant step forward in the social network space - where third party apps can hook into those popular ecosystems much easier.Web ProductsBitTorrent DNA: Hollywood Hitches a Ride with the PiratesThis week BitTorrent announced their content delivery network acceleration service, BitTorrent DNA. DNA will add their peer-to-peer file sharing technology to any CDN to speed up download and streaming services for videos and files. BitTorrent essentially works by harnessing unused network capacity on end-user computers. Anyone downloading or streaming a file also distributes the file to other users, which is broken into smaller chunks and reassembled upon delivery. BitTorrent has long used the distributed peer-to-peer approach for file sharing, and the same idea is employed by companies like Joost for streaming media.Castfire Lands Next New Networks in Major Video PactIn a cross-country deal that will make big waves in the video blogging market, San Francisco's CastFire, the up and coming video publishing tool/ad network, announced a large deal to distribute and provide services for New York's high profile Next New Networks. NNN was founded by former MTV exec Herb Scannell and animation mogul Fred Seibert (MTV's first creative director), has raised $8m in venture fundingand publishes popular series JetSetand Talking Points Memo TV, among others. NNN has to date had a paltry video player and has not been able to monetize its content effectively - so it's no surprise that it's taken on another layer of services with another company. All the networks in NNN are reported to see a total of about 30 million unique visitors per month, but in the video world all metrics are in flux.You can find many other product reviews and startup profiles in our Startups category.AnalysisThe Structured Web - A PrimerAlex Iskold wrote an important article this week outlining the nature of structured information on the Web. He wrote that the evolving aspects of the new web are Semantics, Attention(Implicit Behavior) and Personalization. Regardless of what we are decide to call this next web, theinformation in it is going to be more meaningful, more automatic, and more tailored to each of us. Increasingly, wrote Alex, information on the web is becoming more and more structured. This process is happening viaseveral major movements:The rise of APIsThe proliferation of vertical applications that run on top of existing dataAn increase in classic Semantic Technologies and MicroformatsThe spread of RSS as an information delivery mechanismAre Recommendation Engines a Threat to the Long Tail?Two Wharton academics released an interesting paper recently that asks whether online recommendation services are a threat to the aggregate diversity of items discovered by their users. The study is titled "Blockbuster Culture's Next Rise or Fall: The Impact of Recommender Systems on Sales Diversity". All indications point towards a rise in importance by recommendation engines, so this argument deserves examination. From eBay's acquisition of StumbleUpon to the CBS acquisition of Last.fm to this weekend's MSNBC acquisition of Newsvine - recommendation engines are big money. Marshall Kirkpatrick explored this topic for Read/WriteWeb...In a related post, check outJosh Catone's review of Criticker - Movie Recommendations Based on Taste.You can find more R/WW analysis posts here.ConferencesBIF-3This week R/WW's Josh Catone was at the BIF-3 Collaborative Innovation Summitin Providence, Rhode Island. The BIF-3 event reminded Josh of the TED conference, in that it brings together great minds from across a multitude of disciplines to tell stories and have a converation about innovation. Josh's coverage from the event:BIF-3: Ellen Levy - Ask the Right QuestionsBIF-3: Euan Semple - Bringing Social Networking to the BBCBIF-3: Dan Heath - Think Inside the BoxBIF-3: Jason Fried - Software Should Be OpinionatedR/WW Network Blogslast100Check out a wrapof the week's Digital Lifestyle news on last100. There was lots of music industry news this week. The band Nine Inch Nails announced they were following Radiohead’s lead, by dumping their record label; and Madonna said she plans to do the same. On the digital front, online music service Rhapsody is now available on TiVo; and Universal is reportedly pushing ahead with Total Music, the latest assault on Apple’s iTunes.In Internet TV-related news, Sony’s PS3 game console is to become and IPTV set-top box for Korea Telecom; Vuze, which now boasts 10 million software downloads, has opened up it p2p video distribution platform; and Joost plans to add “live” television to its serviceearly next year.Alt Search EnginesAltSearchEnginesthis week had a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Search debate - Part oneand Part two. It featured Wolf Garbe of FAROO and Jeremie Miller of Wikia/Atlas. One of the questions was: what aspect is the architecture distributed and what are the benefits of this? Wolf said that "FAROO is using a fully distributed architecture: distributed index, distributed crawler, distributed ranking, and distributed search." Jeremie replied that "each entity within Atlas, whether it be the Factory, Collector, or Broker, can be entirely distinct and independent, and will likely be different companies or groups altogether."Read/WriteTalkThis week Sean Ammirati of Read/WriteTalk- our new podcast show - was at the Graphing Social Patterns conference. He sat down with Seth Goldstein, the CEO of Social Media. The podcast discusses Goldstein's work on the Attention Trust non-profit and vision for SocialMedia, his new advertising network for Facebook Applications.PollWe ran a late week pollon what you'd be prepared to pay for the download version of Radiohead's new album In Rainbows (or insert your favorite music artist). The results at press time:US$30 or over 3% US$20-29 2% US$15-19 6% US$10-14 27% US$5-9 40% US$3-4 11% US$1-2 3% less than US$1 1% Free 8% So US$5-9 was the happy medium, with US$10-14 the second most popular choice.That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

  Silicon Alley Insiderspotted the New York Times web site displaying reader comments prominently under the top story on their front page today. The comments in-and-of themselves are not newsworthy -- they came from a post on the site's news blogand the Times has linked to comment threads on the main page before. But this is, to anyone's recollection, the first time the site has actually displayed the actual comments themselves on the site.Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider thought the move was a good one, writing, "Hats off to the company's web team for this smart move!" Other bloggers weren't so upbeat. While it seems that the NYT times took pains to make sure that comments from both ends of the political spectrum were represented for their main page selections -- often to one extreme or the other -- and comments were edited to fit the space, I do question the wisdom of giving reader commentary such prominence on the site's index page.Image from Silicon Alley Insider.We've praised news sites for adding reader commentingas a feature to their web sites in the past, and we recently had kind words about the New York Times Facebook app. However, giving reader comments such a prominent position is dangerous. Readers of news sites (and blogs) go to those specific destinations to read news in the voice they expect -- not to see a public argument from commenters.I would applaud an expansion of New York Times comments beyond blogs to general news stories -- I think commenting is great; it gives readers an outlet for instant response and keeps writers honest. But publishing comments on the main page, especially so prominently under the main story, seems like a bad idea. What do you think? Leave your thoughts in the comments below (we won't publish them on the main page, though!).

  Our poll this weekasks what you'd be prepared to pay for the download version of Radiohead's new album In Rainbows. In the comments to the original post, someone pointed to a Gizmodo reportstating that Radiohead will sell In Rainbows via CD early next year, through one of the 'big four' record companies. The Gizmodo post wrote that Radiohead had "pulled an about-face that feels like a betrayal and a dirty cop-out", because many fans would've downloaded the album thinking it would only be available via Radiohead's website. A later update to the Gizmodo post said that Radiohead had "been planning on dropping the album in CD form in '08 the entire time." So it wasn't an about-face, although it also wasn't reported in many initial news reports - or noted on the Radiohead website itself.A lot of the initial media coverageimplied that there wouldn't be a physical CD release, other than the box set that costs a whopping 40 pounds and will be available in December. There is no mention of a single CD version on the Radiohead website either. So it's fair to say that a lot of people (myself included) got the wrong message; and paid for the digital download assuming it was the only way to get the single album.According to our poll US$5-9 is the most popular price range that people are willing to pay for the digital download version. That pricing will be virtually all profit to Radiohead, so the download version will make some money for the band. However the eventual single CD release will reach a much wider audience, so the physical CDwill end up being the pot of gold at the end of In Rainbows. So much for the big revolution in record sales!But to be fair to Radiohead, they didn't hide that fact it would be on CD in January - it's just that the media didn't report that properly. Probably also some of us Webheads are guilty of over-hyping the Internet download (did I just say that?!) and thinking it would immediately replace the CD. Getting the album a few months ahead of time and for a very low price is still a great deal.There's still time to take part in our poll this week. Let us know what a digital download album, from an artist's website, is worth to you:Free Polls- Take Our Poll

  Born out of a closet dislike for "Shrek 2," Critickeris a new movie review community and recommendation engine that aims to match users with like-minded individuals who share the same cinematic taste. Once you've rated 10 movies at Criticker it begins to form what they call a Taste Compatibility Index (TCI) that matches you up with not only other users, but also professional reviewers who share your taste in movies (though, I found that site really doesn't start delivering usable results untily you've rated around 50 flicks).One of the most important features of the site is how painless they make the process of ranking first 10 films (or your next 100). While you can search out specific films and rank them one at a time, similar to any other movie community, you can also page through randomly generated lists of 10 films at once, ranking each on a 1-100 scale. I was able to rank 80 films in just about 30 minutes by going the random route. Certainly not all my favorite films were represented (I made sure they were ranked later by searching them out), but I did give the site a good sized sample to work with that covered both films I like and films I loathe. Had I been forced to search out movies on my own, my list likely would have been skewed toward mostly films I like -- recommendation engines should in theory work better if they also know what not to send your way.After ranking your first 50 or so movies, Criticker begins to fill in your TCI with users and critics who have similar tastes based on mutual rankings. The more films you rank, the better and more accurate your matches will become -- matches based on 100 rankings in common are bound to be more accurate than those based on 10.You can set a "films in common" minimum for Criticker to take into consideration when using your TCIs to power recommendations. I have mine set to the default of 10% (or about 8 films out of my 80+ rankings). That means that even though at the moment Jamie Levy of Variety is my top critic match, Criticker should ignore his recommendations for me because we only have 3 films in common.When Criticker makes a recommendation, it assigns movies a Probable Score Indicator (PSI), which estimates the ranking you would likely give the movie based on your past rankings the rankings of your TCIs. Based on critic reviews, the site is today recommending that I should go see "Into the Wild" with a PSI of 88, and based on users and critics the site is telling me I should rent "Casino Royale" with a PSI of 90. Those recommendations seem pretty accurate -- "Into the Wild" has been on the top of the list of movies I am looking forward to, and I enjoyed "Casino Royale" (I haven't rated it yet, which is why the site recommended it to me).Criticker lets you add friends (called "kumpels") as well, and track their ratings and reviews, even if their TCI score does not make them a match to your own. And this week the site launched a Facebook applicationthat brings their social film recommendation engine to your Facebook friends list and competes with popular Facebook film rating and review apps, such as Flixter's ubiquitous "Movies."ConclusionCriticker is a nice site that makes rating a lot of movies fun and easy -- I rated more in 30 minutes on the site than I have in 10 years of casual IMDb use. Their recommendation engine makes mostly good recommendations (with a few misses here and there), and the ability to tweak how it interacts with your Taste Compatibility Index to determine rankings means you can up the accuracy of ratings. Unlike sites that recommend products based on what everyone thinks of them, Criticker recommends films based only on the opinions of people who have a similar taste as you, which makes a big difference.The lesson there may be that the crowd as a whole isn't always smart (or at least isn't well suited to every task we try to throw at it). However, more focused crowd intelligence can yield potentially exceptional results.

  Everyone is jumping on the Facebook "open platform" bandwagon, but LinkedIncan at least say it was among the first to issue copycat-intent statements shortly after the Facebook event. Richard MacManus covered the possibilities offered by a LinkedIn platform here in June. Now LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye has done an interview with the New York Timeswhere he laid out some of the vision for the company's upcoming outreach to outside developers.It won't be a very warm welcome compared to the Facebook lovefest. Though this should be unsurprising, LinkedIn's platform will require permission from the company before developers can get in on the action. Though Facebook apps do need to be added by Facebook to the app directory, a quick look through there shows that the bar is low enough that it may as well be open to all.I've talked to many companies holding out for a future opportunity to score real estate on LinkedIn profile pages. Nye says in this interview that the average income of a LinkedIn user is $140k per year - it's a real injustice that such high-quality human beings won't have easy access to all our widgets.LinkedIn will focus its platform on letting developers tie LinkedIn functionality to outside services (Salesforce is the example given, surprise surprise) and to adding buttoned-up business functionality to LinkedIn itself. It's Not a Social Network!Nye also told the Times that LinkedIn doesn't consider itself a social network, either. That's funny, that's what Facebook loudly insisted on to its developers pre-platform launch, too. They weren't allowed to mention MySpace or the phrase social networking in their PR. Facebook is a social utility- they insisted. That was an eye-roller at the time and sounds even sillier now.We'll see what the LinkedIn platform looks like when the rubber finally hits the road, but when it happens - don't quit your day job to be a LinkedIn app developer.

  I'm regularly outspoken about my concerns that Google is going to take over the world and start passing out brain implants - but the fact of the matter is that I love Google services. Today's announcement that more GMail storage is on the wayis heartening, but you've got to wonder: why is this mighty giant messing around with anything other than a total storage solution for all my data across all their apps? Where is the GDrive already?Google told analystsmore than a year ago that it wanted to store 100% of our data, a "golden copy." Perhaps its failure to do so yet is a sign of the finite power it truly holds. Or perhaps its just a ruse to lull cynics like me into a false sense of security. That's probably not what's happening.I should probably pay $50 for super Google, as advocated this morning by Amit Agarwalin reference to the news. See also one estimate of forthcoming free storage capacity over at the blog Googlified.Finally, I'm sure there are some of you out there that still haven't seen the following video about the future of Google and the web in general. It's not to be missed, it's thought provoking and funny. See you in the "hive mind" if it ever arrives!