In August we reviewed Demand Media, one of the largest producers of content on the Webtoday. Wired Magazine recently comparedDemand Media's content business to Henry Ford's production line for cars. Demand Media currently produces 4,000 new pieces of content a day. What's more, it's increasingly syndicating this content to media sites outside of its own network of vertical websites. In other words, Demand Media is becoming a very large content production factory for third party sitessuch as Yahoo.In this follow-up post, we dive deeper into Demand Media's content production model - and ask questions about the qualityof the output.SponsorThis article is based on an interview I conducted with several Demand Media executives, including founder Richard Rosenblatt, at the Web 2.0 Summit in September.Will Demand Media Soon be a Household Name?In our previous posts, we've noted that Demand Media is rapidly rising up the comScore list of the top 50 web properties in the U.S.- in July it was #24, in Septemberit was #15. At this rate, Demand Media will soon be one of the top 10 Web properties in the U.S. - right up there with Amazon, eBay, Apple.Think about that: how many of you had heard of Demand Media before this year? Amazon, eBay and Apple are all household names. Demand Media (along with another fast-growing mega content site, Answers.com) could be a household name soon too, if its current growth rate continues. Behind this remarkable growth is a very large output of content each and every day, fueled by thousands of freelance writers and content creators. So how does Demand Media produce so much content every day? 4,000 new articles a day is a quantum leap above the 20-30 new posts a day that the most feverish of professional blogs pump out. About Demand StudiosDemand Media produces so much content with a system it calls Demand Studios. It's a proprietary editorial system which is part human-processed and part automated. The system starts with an automated process, crunching data and running it through an algorithm to identify story ideas that have the best chance of success. The algorithm factors in audience type, ability to attract advertising and potential for traffic. For a written piece of content, human editors will then check the top story contenders. Potential titles are placed into a pool for writer selection. Once a writer picks up a story, it gets written up, goes through a fact checking and copy editing process (including a plagiarism check), and finally the editorial team approves the completed article. The article is eventually published and the writer gets paid. This is a simplification of the Demand Studios process, which happens 4,000 times every day! The system appears to be an efficient mix of automation and human labor. As we'll see on Page 2 of this post, the editorial process isn't foolproof. But even so, the scale of this system is impressive.As at the end of October, Demand Studios had created more than one million original pieces of content, both text articles andvideos. There are more than 6,000 active Demand Studios freelance creators - including writers, filmmakers, title proofers, copy editors. In my meeting with Demand Media executives at the recent Web 2.0 Summit, I was told that an average of 11 people- and 15 unique roles- touch a piece of content as it flows through Demand Studios. The company argues that this, along with community rating of content, produces quality content. But does it, actually?Next Page: The Quality Question...Demand Media: Is This ReallyQuality Content?Demand Media is sensitive to criticism of the quality of its content. It's a question that ReadWriteWeb has raised a few times and which Wired picked up on in its October profile. At the end of that article, Wired noted that Demand Media is "trying to place a new emphasis on quality." However it concludes by saying that Demand Media is "not moving far from [the] Henry Ford model."I asked Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt about this criticism. Bristling, he responded by pointing to two things. Firstly Rosenblatt claimed that many of Demand Media's content creators are professionals. He said that 75% of them have been published in magazines or newspapers, 25% have written a book, and 25% have held professional marketing roles.Example of Demand Media content, on Yahoo! network site 'Shine.'Secondly, Rosenblatt noted that Demand Media content creators have choicesin the market - but they choose to work for Demand Media. What's more, Rosenblatt said that "quality is based on relevance" - a quote he attributed to Wired editor Chris Anderson, who wrote the books The Long Tailand Free.Who then are these people that write and shoot video for Demand Media? They're professional freelancersand they're paid anywhere from $15-30 per piece of content. This isn't a great deal of money for a freelance article. But according to Demand Media, there are hundreds of such freelancers earning thousands of dollars per month from Demand Studios (although this would be the top of the range).4,000 New Articles Per Day - What Percentage is High Quality?The trouble with the term 'quality' is that it's both variable and subjective. I've seen examples of Demand Media work that are poor - e.g. this eHow articleabout how to get Twitter followers.Step 3 reads as follows:"Engage in discussions. If someone on your timeline says something interesting or says something that you can put input into, do it. There's nothing worse than Twitter followers who follows for no reason. Even if you don't get responses some of the time, it doesn't hurt to try and the people you're following will know you're attemption to converse and are more likely to follow you back."There are a couple of bad typos in that paragraph (where were the copy editors?), but worse is that the advice is mediocre. It's relevant content to many people, but is it goodcontent? Apparently it was to the people who've read it, as it has 5 stars...The bigger question is: there are surely many examples of goodDemand Media content on the Web, but how many of the 4,000 articles it produces every day aren't?As we posited in our previous article, the concern with fast-growing content factories like Demand Media and Answers.com is that quality is taking too much of a back seat to quantity. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.In our next post, we will look into the type of contentthat Demand Media is producing - and what it plans to do with it next.Discuss

  Almost three years ago, Lee and Sachi LeFever created their first video to explain RSS. They called the video RSS in Plain English. They used paper cut outs to explain the XML format. It became an instant hit. Tens of thousands of people watched it. Today their company, Common Craft, make all sorts of custom videos. They've built a business around explaining concepts.Their latest video explains cloud computing. Sponsor"Cloud Computing in Plain English,"ells the story of a florist whose business grows. She learns about cloud computing and realizes that perhaps maybe she should not have to worry about fixing broken servers.videoCloud computing is one of those topics that confuses and confounds people. Larry Ellisonloves to poke at it. It's the hot topic so it is refreshing to see Lee once again explain the topic in simple terms that pretty much anyone can understand. It makes everyone's job a bit simpler.Which takes us to the last point of the day. We get so many pitches from companies. The services are explained in terms that often need deciphering. What if more companies in the enterprise space spent more time explaining what they do? What if companies did something like what Common Craft did for Twitter or with Google to help explainGoogle Docs? We covered indiceeyesterday. Why? We think their product looks pretty valuable. But you know what set them apart? They made a great video. It was compelling to watch. It made us laugh. We started to think about what they do. Pretty soon we were writing about them! Here's a challenge. Make a video about what your enterprise software does. Show us a page with all sorts of ways we can learn what you are all about. If it really does explain what you do then that will deserve some mention here. Just leave a comment pointing to where we can see what you've done and we'll get back to you. Promise.Discuss

  Data extracted from 500 million Twitter messages was released today by a tiny Texas startup company that forward-looking geeks have been watching for a year. Austin-based Infochimpsannounced this afternoon that itis now selling two important and very large sets ofTwitter data. Limited samples of the data are available for free and a third, most important, set of data still won't be ready for a few more hours. "What we want is to see people use this to build web apps," Infochimps co-founder Flip Kromer told us today. "You take this data, mash it up with any other very large corpus of data with timestamps - and you've got a web app." SponsorThis is particular, extracted data though - not the full text of Tweets. "We're trying to be careful," Kromer says, "we are not yet exposing the contents of tweets." And this data isn't cheap, if you want the numbers broken out by the hour instead of the month.This is a very big move because most developers struggle to get access to a large quantity of data from Twitter.Here's what InfoChimps is putting on sale:Hashtags, links and smiley emoticons used across Twitter on an hour by hour basis.@ messages, RT and favorites and who they came from - 1 Billion relations making what the company calls a "conversation metric."A useful if less exciting set of data that will help developers map user ID numbers from search.twitter over to the different ID numbers used in the primary Twitter API. These systems were never merged and it can require a lot of API calls to merge user data.The company believes it is capturing about 10% of the total data on Twitter right now but Kromer says that he believes he can ramp that up to 30%. Data As a Pot of GoldInfoChimps is a bulk data marketplace with more than 5000 data sets in its catalog so far. The vast majority are free and were added by the company's own staff, but not all. The decades-old polling firm Zogby International, for example, is selling some Iraqi polling data through InfoChimps. Cross-reference that polling data with publicly available data about civilian casualties in Iraq and you can see some interesting patterns, InfoChimps' PR rep Josh Dilworth told us. (Dilworthis known as the most data-savvy PR guy in the Web 2.0 world and also represents Wolfram Alphaand Twine.)The company hopes that it can sell the data derived from sitting on the Twitter API as a demonstration of the value that this and other data sets have. InfoChimps says it can help companies monetize data that they'd otherwise be paying to serve up through repeated API calls, if at all.From sentiment analysis(not yet an option with the current InfoChimps data set) to social graph discovery(definitely an option), we've written extensively here before about the impacts that social data could have on business, social and political policies in the future.John Zogby, founder of polling firm Zogby International, talked to us at length (in a separate phone interview several months ago) about the value of using online social networks to measure public opinion. "We've been particularly known for innovating and polling new technologies," he said."83% of all households are online today and 92% of likely voters, so with online polling we are today about where the country was with telephone penetration when telephone surveys started. Social networking is not as representative as online access [in general] yet, but I'm comfortable with caveats: that you can do a random sampling, so long as you claim that's what your universe is, as long as you don't extrapolate to all Americans, etc. It has tremendous, tremendous value. "I know that the landline era is coming to an end - not today or tomorow but we've got to find new and different ways of doing our work. It's the same kind of cross roads as the 70's when we moved away from the door to door, mail-in the results, to the land lines. "Online, frankly just like telephone, doesn't have the minority population, but for market surveys you may be looking for a different kind of consumer. "We know that the landline phone is pushing us away, we know that we can't use the cellphone in the same way, and we know that we've got to reinvent this industry [of measuring public opinion]. What's happening are simultaneous new technologies and at the same time growing penetration of these new technologies. We're riding a bucking bronco."Use CasesThe conversation metric data InfoChimps is selling is the most exciting to me. Imagine a 3rd party app using historical social conversation data to filter Twitter or other messages based on the strongest social connections that I or other people have. Imagine, for example, social Q&A service Aardvarkcombining the Twitter Lists API with this InfoChimps data set for a scenario like this: "You have a question about stock options? How would you like us to find a person who knows about that, is regularly conversed-with by people on Robert Scoble's Twitter list of Venture Capitalists and is available right now?" That sounds pretty great to me. The possible applications are many. "I see Twitter as a data acquisition device for what people talk about and how they relate to each other," InfoChimps' Kromer says.Right now InfoChimps is selling the hashtag and link dataset for $8,000 and the social metric data set for $9500. Eventually the company will likely move to a subscription model.How They Got the DataHow did InfoChimps get the data? The company hits the Twitter Developer API 20,000 times an hour (the standard for developers) but takes big swaths of data each time it does. "I have a priority queue," Kromer told us. "I can set a search term, for each search term I can get 1500 tweets per API call. If I get 1500 tweets at a time then the number of wasted tweets at the end of a series of searches is the smallest. If I'm searching for a term and get less than 1500 results back, then I forecast how long it will take to fill that number of results back up to the maximum and move it down the priority queue accordingly. On the lowest priority I have searches for RT or http. There will always be 1500 results for that. It's only API calls that limit me. As is, it's like a fisherman setting nets, what matters is that dinner is tasty."Does that sound so hard? Worth thousands of dollars? Here's what Kromer says:"It's not magic. If you talk to people who use Hadoop and do social networking analysis this is underwhelming. You take 30 million users, 1 billion links, adorn each link with info at the end of the link and acrue it with the person at the head of the link. That breaks conventional databases; the plumbing is hard. The math is easy but when you do it a billion times a billion times it starts to get interesting. You have to be careful and clever. We plan to do stuff that is structural, a clustering co-efficient, true pagerank."Ultimately it's about specialization and data as a service. "The people we need to come in and connect this info with human beings," Kromer says, "aren't the people who should be wasting their time on the math. And the guys who are good at doing these things should not be building web apps."But Can They Get Away With It?There's some question whether Twitter will allow InfoChimps to sell data based on Twitter data. Kromer says he'd much rather resell the data on a commission than have to do all the work he's done to set up the extraction system. But it was a year ago that InfoChimps caught the eye of people who love data - by releasing a large collection of scraped Twitter data. The InfoChimps blog post read: "Big huge thanks to twitter.com: they have given us permission to share this freely. Please go build tools with this data that make both twitter.com and yourself rich and famous: then more corporations will free their data."But then Twitter founder Evan Williams asked InfoChimps to take those data sets down until a Terms of Service for them could be figured out. That never happened, and communication between the two companies hasn't progressed very far over the last year. InfoChimps does not have Twitter's permission to do what it did today, but Kromer says Twitter hasn't contacted them either. No one from Twitter headquarters has responded to our request for comment yet."We talked to our lawyer about this a lot," Kromer told us, "we are on absolutely solid ground with regards to copyright, user privacy and use of the API. This is clearly for the benefit of their community."That's nice that Kromer feels so assured, but his attitude seems a little unrealistic.We asked technology journalist Robert Scoblewhat he thought of the dilemma and his opinion was pretty clear. "If Twitter wants to be a platform they have to behave like a platform," he said. "Don't be king-makers, let the marketplace choose the winners. If they are going to say nobody should study the data because we're going to sell that, that's not being a platform. Twitter tries to pick the winners and it pisses me off. They admit that they are king-makers. All that does is make everyone vote against them and hope a competitor comes around."Perhaps time will tell - but these are very early days in what looks to be an era of widespread innovation built on top of social data analysis.Discuss

  The OpenID Foundation has announced nominations and upcoming elections for six open community board seats.This year marks the Foundation's second election; last year, Snorri Giorgetti, Nat Sakimura, Chris Messina, David Recordon, Eric Sachs, Scott Kveton, and Brian Kissel were elected. Of the current community board members, Messina and Sakimura were elected to two-year terms. Kveton has indicated he will not serve another term.SponsorIndividuals who are passionate about OpenID and digital identity, regardless of professional affiliations, are welcome as candidates. The election process, beginning with nominations, will begin Monday, November 23. The process is detailed in this PDF. Nominations and voting are open to all Foundation members, and membershipfor individuals starts at $25. Nominations will close on December 7, and voting will end December 23.In a blog posttoday, executive director Don Thibeau wrote that he envisions changes for how the board and the Foundation will operate in the coming year."Organizations that have transitioned from specification development to market adoption (the space we entered this year) have evolved their governance and membership programs to meet operational and financial objectives. In order to improve the core technology product, drive RP adoption, and increase member services, we need to find ways to offer more membership value and create diversified sources of income. "2010's board members will consider how best to balance competing priorities with still unfolding value in the trust framework and certification work to do with the U.S. government and others. We've been told by experts that demand for certification is a leading indicator of the growth and maturity of a technology standard. How we do certification will, in part, shape our future."As distributed social networking continues to grow and shape the web we use, issues such as creating secure, portable digital identities become more and more intrinsic to making the Internet work for users, for sites, and for content creators. Thibeau concluded, "For myself, I believe an open, reliable, trusted identity standard can be the next key operational piece of Internet infrastructure. It can be to the identity layer what DNS is to the Web layer and IP is to the packet layer."Indeed, the past year has brought lots of publicity and material advances to the Foundation's cause. At the beginning of 2009, we reportedthat Google and Plaxo had created a simplified workflow for OpenID logins that added OAuth and the Google Contacts API. During the OpenID UX Summit in February, we wrotethat one Comcast property reported a 92 percent success rate with OpenID logins. Perhaps most exciting of all was this May's newsthat Facebook would be allowing users to login using OpenID. But no nod of approval carried more weight than the recent decision of the U.S. governmentto allow members of the public to use OpenID to login to certain government websites.We look forward to reporting more good things - including nomination and election results - from the Foundation in the months to come.Discuss

  Bloggers, muckrakers and news fanatics, lend me your ears. It's entirely possible that we've discovered one of the best tweetmeme_url = 'http://www.readwriteweb.com/readwritestart/2009/11/parsely-a-feed-reader-that-ada.php';tweetmeme_source = 'rww';approaches to media monitoring since RSS itself. My mother always said, "You'll never get what you want unless you ask." But with adaptive feed application Parse.ly, that simply isn't true. Rather than forcing us to abandon our overflowing feed readers, Parse.ly records our preferences and learns to work with us. SponsorThe problem with most feed readers is that they're controlled by humans - namely, us. As curators of the web, we collect disparate links in Jekyll and Hyde-like bouts and then forget to maintain our feeds. It's totally understandable. Over time and depending on our moods, our interests change. Years ago the term "social media" may have seemed as futuristic as robotic exoskeletons and citizen space travel. Today, if you're naive enough to add "social media" as one of your feed-related interests, you're likely to drown in a river of presentation posts. Parse.ly hopes to change that. To begin, Parse.ly asks users to enter the topics they'd like to read about. From here you use a drag and drop interface to determine your scale of interest around each topic. Your favorite topics go into a "Most" interested box while your fleeting fancies are labeled as "Somewhat" interesting. From here the system scores and compiles your reading list based on relevancy. As you star, unstar and delete items, Parse.ly learns your preferences and acts accordingly. For those of us suffering from information overload, this is a great way to get back on track. Rather than having to go through each and every subscription, users can either ignore articles or take an active role in removing or demoting an interest. What's more, the fact that this system is adaptive means that based on keyword matching, it may just serve you up some unknown gems. Parse.ly is currently in closed beta and is expected to launch in 2010. If you'd like to try the service, register for an invite at parse.ly.Parsely Tourfrom Sachin Kamdaron Vimeo.Discuss

  Shopping is horror. The prices. The lines. The hordes of clamoring consumers - the thought of holiday shopping is, in itself, enough to make us wish for simpler days when putting coal in someone's sock was a legitimate option.But, whether we like it or not, we can't Grinch out; so we'd better start thinking about the gift-giving season now and get it over with. And since your friends at ReadWriteWeb are huge geeks, we thought we'd amuse you with a few Internet-enabled oddities that might actually make your obligatory retail purgatory a little more bearable.Sponsor1) WishzillaIf there's anything worse than shopping for a loved one's gift, it's shopping for a loved one whose preferences, tastes, and needs are a complete mystery. Don't worry: It doesn't mean you're insensitive. You've just got your mind on other things.The solution: For quick, decisive, and possible all-online gift-buying, coerce every potential gift recipient into signing up at Wishzilla. The creators of this site have kept the clear-cut, actionable sensibility of the gift registry while maintaining the element of surprise. Here's how it works: Users login with Facebook (or create an account) and then start bookmarking their gift wishlist all over the web. Once the list is done, it's locked. Signed, sealed, and sent to Santa. What items have been purchased and by whom remain a secret until the wrapping paper gets torn away.Everyone wins, and no one is left feeling awkward about that good-intentioned but ill-advised sweater.2 &3) Customized Clothing for Him, Her, Hym, Etc.We've recently been exposed to the wonderful world of e-spoke apparel. We actually just made up the term e-spoke as a portmanteau of electronic and bespoke; basically, there are a few sites out there that allow for high-quality and entirely customizable wearable goods; in fact, some of them are very forward-thinking, technologically.For the dress shirt-wearer in your life, we have ShirtsMyWay, a site that lets the user completely customize their ideal of collared and cuffed perfection. Our Twitter research has shown that some folks find the site a little spendy; but seriously, a beautiful dress shirt designed to your exact specifications and measurements is worth the extra cost - which, we might add, is significantly less than most other customized apparel experiences.And for your feminine side, we have Shoes of Prey. The URL alone takes no prisoners, and neither will your fierce creations. Heels on these completely customizable beasts only elevate the wearer a modest 3.5 inches at their highest, but the ability to branch beyond the dyed-satin-bridesmaid-shoe paradigm of shoe customization is more than enough incentive to check out this site.4) StorenvyIf Craiglist, eBay, and Etsy had some kind of inter-website relations and made a web-baby, it would be Storenvy. In a prettily designed community setting, users can set up buyer and seller accounts. The site is a series of independent online retailers and shoppers who browser across all of those stores at once, interacting with each other by watching what notes and ratings they leave on products and stores throughout the site. Check out the social features in action here, or just set up an account and start having fun.Better yet, get your friends to set up accounts and thus remove some of the guesswork from gifting.5) Regretsy, the Gag Gift You Can't Resist &Will Never Live DownRubber chickens, whoopie cushions, every sadistic and horrifyingly cheap Secret Santa atrocity - none of it can match the horrors found on Regretsy. We actually feel pity for the people who buy or receive the Etsy-fueled inventory from this site. If you ever wondered what kinds of jewelry can be made from animal feces or exactly who makes embroidered toilet paper, you have found your web-enabled holy grail. If not, well, you're in for a good laugh and at least a few ideas for passive-aggressive office gift exchanges. Forced, semi-professional merriment will never be the same.So there you have it, folks! You never have to leave your three-monitor array of addictive Internet connectivity to satisfy the whims of the potential gift recipients in your life. Just use these tools and a little personal judgement, and all your holiday shopping-related worries can be laid to rest.We just hope we have a similarly good list when it comes to last-minute shopping; god knows we plan to procrastinate as long as possible, helpful tools notwithstanding.Discuss

  Hewlett-Packard will acquire 3Com for $2.7 billion to compete more effectively against Cisco Systemsin the competitive computer networking market.The deal, announced this afternoon, appears on the surface to help HP gain a position in China. This is where the action is in the computer networking market and a main reason for the acquisition. But below the surface is a story about 3Com'sfalling position in the Chinese market and the rise of Huawei Technologies, a player that everyone is watching, including Cisco, which considers the Chinese company its biggest rival.SponsorAt stake is nothing less than billions of dollars in computer networking gear and the bounty that comes with data center consolidation and the convergence of servers, storage, networking, management, facilities and services.TippingPoint is one of the jewels that HP receives as part of the 3Com acquisition. According to HP, TippingPoint has been the leader in Gartner's "Magic Quadrant" in its evaluation of leading network security products. HP says that about 30 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies have already deployed TippingPoint "intrusion prevention systems."Once one of the world's leading networking hardware firms, 3Com fell behind in the market before finding salvation in China's booming market for telecommunications gear. The company went into a partnership with Huawei Technologies until 3Com bought the entire joint venture operation in 2006. That buyout came after Huawei and Bain Ventures unsuccessfully tried to acquire 3Com. The deal died after the US Congress raised concerns about the acquisition. Huawei is funded in part by the Chinese Government. Its technology is used by the Chinese military.After the buyout, Huawei agreed not to compete with 3Com until 2008. Since then, Huawei has been a strong competitor, taking market share from 3Com.Huawei is the one to watch as this merger unfolds. Cisco calls Huawei its biggest competitor. In a press conference Monday, Chambers said that in the big picture, "It's Huawei, Huawei and Huawei."How much HP will really benefit from 3Com? Nerd Twilighthad this take in July when it looked like 3Com was not faring so well in its competition with Huawei:"...What makes it worse is that 3Com will not be able to compensate for the loss of Huawei business in China, where it is attempting to build its own channels and customer base; nor in Europe or North America, especially the latter, where 3Com's name has been tarnished severely by its historical cut-and-run lack of commitment to enterprise customers and markets.3Com has done a masterful job with PR earlier this year, driving up its stock with a narrative about its comeback as an end-to-end purveyor of networking gear capable of taking share from an allegedly distracted and vulnerable Cisco Systems, longtime hegemonic power in enterprise networking.Indeed, Cisco is heading off in many directions, and it might be exposed to other players, but HP, with its ProCurve gear, looks set to pick up whatever marbles slip from Cisco's grasp. IBM, thanks to OEM deals with Juniper Networks and Brocade Communications, also is well placed to take some business -- and don't be surprised if IBM doesn't acquire Juniper or Brocade at some point.Both HP and Cisco see the opportunity of data-center consolidation -- servers, storage, networks, the whole shooting match -- aided and abetted by virtualization. IBM sees it, too, but it hasn't yet committed to direct ownership of a networking business unit, perhaps still reeling from the field-sales hangover that resulted from its former addiction to Cisco as a networking partner."Discuss

  Let's face it, the music industry is broken. Labels charge stations and providers exorbitant fees, independent sites have little chance of recouping their costs and in the end, the listening experience is fragmented and confusing. In our current model, a company like Groovesharkpays a fee for your stream even if you have access to a song via a separate paid subscription service or download. In other words, labels are getting paid twice on songs you already own the listening rights to. In order to change that, Playdaroffers us a chance to search for music by artist and song including accessing the files we already own. SponsorWhile services like Twonesaggregate web-based music profiles, Playdar goes one step further by scanning local files, network files and the web to find a match. With Playdar, users allow the tool to scan their desktops, networked machines and music subscription profiles before streaming a web-based alternative like Last.fmor Imeem. As streaming music competitors Rdio, Lucas Gonze, Jones has yet another chance to build a music discovery engine. To try out some early demos and applications, visit playdar.org. Discuss

  Mozilla just launcheda new directory for Jetpack add-ons. Jetpack is Mozilla's newest technology for building Firefox extensions with Javascript, HTML and CSS. Mozilla announceda major update to Jetpack yesterday. Today's launch of the new gallery will finally make it easier for Jetpack developers to showcase their plugins and for users to find interesting and useful new plugins to try. The new gallery has a lot of extra features that the Firefox add-on librarydoesn't currently have, including the ability to showcase new plugins with video demos.SponsorSome Interesting JetpacksAs of now, the Jetpack library only features a small number of extensions. Users can browse Jetpacks by tag, author and popularity (though the most popular Jetpack (a Google Wave add-on) currently only has 24 downloads. Nonetheless, quite a few interesting Jetpack add-ons have already found their way into the gallery. These include a tool that translates text with Google Translate, a browser-based image editorfrom pixlrthat can be invoked from the right-click menu in Firefox and a plugin that displays tabs with thumbnails in the left sidebar.Give it a TryTo get started with Jetpack, you have to install the Jetpack pluginfirst. After that, just head over to the Jetpack Gallery and install a few of the plugins. To manage the installed Jetpacks, point your browser to about:jetpack.Discuss

  Google just announced that it now uses public data from the World Bank to display graphs for queries like "children per woman in brazil" or "internet users in the united states." To do so, Google makes uses of the World Bank's public API. Through this, Google can access 17 World Development Indicators. Google displays this data in interactive graphs that make it easy to compare stats for different countries. The timing of this announcement was likely planned to coincide with the newsabout Wolfram Alpha's integration with Microsoft's Bing. SponsorGoogle vs. WolframEarlier this year, Google also addeddata from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Divisionto its search results page. The queries that Google showcases in today's blog post (gdp of a country, internet users in the USor energy use in Iceland) are exactly the kind of queries where Wolfram Alpha excels. Currently, Bing doesn't display this kind of data from Wolfram Alpha and just focuses on math and nutrition, but a deeper integration between the two is just a matter of time. Wolfram Alpha uses curated data sets - just like the World Bank or Census Bureau data - to compute its results. Google's current use of this data is less ambitious. Google wants to make public data more accessible - Wolfram Alpha wants to be a 'computational knowledge engine' that can manipulate these data sets. Google Wants Your Public DataOne interesting aspect of today's blog post is that Google points out that there are "still many other data sets and sources out there, and we're excited about the possibilities for the future." Google also asks data publishers who are interested in making their data discoverable in Google to contactthe company.In the current implementation, Google can display results for the following types of questions: CO2 emissions per capita, Electricity consumption per capita, Energy use per capita, Exports as percentage of GDP, Fertility rate, GDP deflator change, GDP growth rate, GNI per capita in PPP dollars, Gross Domestic Product, Gross National Income in PPP dollars, Imports as percentage of GDP, Internet users as percentage of population, Life expectancy, Military expenditure as percentage of GDP, Mortality rate, under 5, Population, and Population growth rate.Discuss

  We test a lot of software around here, on the web, on our desktop and on our phones. It's a great job to have, but only so much of what we test really sticks and becomes a part of our daily routines. tweetmeme_url = 'http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/great_new_apps_november.php';tweetmeme_source = 'rww';Every once in awhile we like to compare lists in our team chat room and then share them with you.Here are the latest tools and services we've come to love, maybe you'd like to give them a try too.SponsorPosterousThink you find a lot of great stuff online? You should try sharing it with people using Posterous. The user experience for this curation and blogging tool is remarkable, a real model for other app makers to check out. Posting by email, iPhone and a web bookmarklet are all really easy. My Posterous is hereand Frederic Lardinois shares some of this favorite stuff here. If you like what we write about on ReadWriteWeb then check out the cool little things we find but don't blog about at the day job - or the things that will make it to ReadWriteWeb later. Posterous just went real timethis week, too.See also: How to Use Tumblr, Posterous and Other Light Blogging ServicesTopifyEver feel frustrated by the emails you get from Twitter? We did, until we signed up for Topify. From really smart "X is now following you" emails to the ability to reply to direct messages by email - Topify delivers Twitter emails like Twitter ought to. It's another project from Ouriel Ohayon, who's also behind the wonderful iPhone app sharing service AppsFire. Ouriel makes cool stuff.See also: Ten Companies Twitter Should Consider Acquiring NextSeesmic WebThe never-ending battle between Seesmicand Tweetdeckto see who can make the coolest Twitter client is great for users. Tweetdeck ate my groups last night in an upgrade, after I'd spent hours building them, and so I decided to give Seesmic another try. The Seesmic Web app is awesome and Mac users can turn it into its own app on the desktop using Fluid. The best of many cool features? List support! You can turn any list you're following on Twitter into its own column in Seesmic. Frederic Lardinois says he's been using this combo for a few weeks, I still have some kinks to work out. See also: Seesmic + Twhirl is a Vision of the Web's Future(From 18 months ago, how did our prediction turn out?)Tweetie 2The iPhone app Tweetie (iTunes link) made a major upgrade last monthand we're loving it. Sarah Perez put this one on the list but everyone agrees - this is hot stuff. Will the forthcoming Seesmic Mobile app be as good? Will Tweetdeck's eventual support for Twitter lists turn into an awesome iPhone app? We'll see - but Tweetie's many rich features make it the app to beat right now. My favorite feature? The way the replies page can be pulled down like a spring to prompt a refresh. It's a little thing, but it's fun.See also: The Favorite iPhone Apps of Five Geek Rock StarsAardvarkAardvarkleverages what it calls "the real-time web of people" to deliver answers to any question you have - from people in your social circle who know about the topic and are available at that very moment. Vark gets mixed reviews from some people, but I love it. From technical questions to practical ones about life to opinions about questions I have at work - I've been getting a lot of fast, helpful information from people on Aardvark lately. It's another app that scores very high on User Experience, especially in its iPhone and IM interfaces.See also: The Robot Made Me Do It: Comparing 3 New Cyborg Q&A ServicesChrome/ChromiumGoogle's web browser is fast, it's really fast. It's hard to say goodbye to all the wonderful Firefox extensions we've been using for years - but it's harder to use any other browser once you've been using Chrome for awhile. We have high hopes for Chrome plug-ins, but even without them it's a joy to use. You can download Chrome for Windows hereand Chromium for Machere.LazyFeedLazyFeedis a topic-driven "discovery engine." It's basically a blog search client that brings in the freshest posts about topics you're interested in. A couple of months into using it, I'm still finding great content every time I fire it up. I've got this running in Fluidand it works great.Want some serendipity on the iPhone? Try out competitor YourVersion'sapp. The first version isn't easy on the eyes, but it delivers roughly the same experience on the go.See also: Ten Useful Examples of the Real-Time Web in ActionThose are some of our favorites lately.What apps have you fallen in love with this season? We'd love to know. See also our previous installments in this series:30 Days Later: 22 Apps We're Still Using One Month After Finding ThemFrom one year ago!Still Shiny: 23 Apps We're Using One Month LaterFrom this Spring.What We Use: A Tour of RWW Desktops (Mac &PC)Video screencasts.Discuss

  We're very pleased to announce the launch of ReadWriteWeb's fourth country channel: ReadWriteWeb Spain. It joins our existing three country channels: France, Chinaand Brazil(which launched last month).Our Spain channel is edited by Ignacio García Ramos. Ignacio and his team will combine translation of ReadWriteWeb posts with original posts about Spain's Web market. Like the mothership ReadWriteWeb, the Spain channel will focus on Web trends and products.SponsorWe're grateful to our partners IntegralCom, a Spanish web agencyand consultancy firm based in Madrid. CEO Miguel Galera and Corporate Development Officer Eduardo Vilar have been instrumental in organizing ReadWriteWeb Spain.Ignacio gave us the following background about Spain: "We happen to be a country with very few English speakers (by European standards), so we feel that bringing home a valuable piece of Sillicon Valley and making it accessible to our entrepreneurs, startups and hobbyists is a way of contributing to pushing this country forward in technology. We would like to gather a community of decision takers and influential professionals around ReadWriteWeb Spainand make things happen. Our economy has largely been based on construction and the economic turmoil has hit us hard. There is talk of "changing bricks for computers". We want to be at the cutting edge of this movement and we found no better vehicle than ReadWriteWeb. We also share a lot of ReadWriteWeb's interests, like the semantic and the real-time web; and values such as analytical, uncompromisable journalism. It's great to stay current on those issues, thanks to your updates [at ReadWriteWeb.com] and best practices, but we'll also broadcast news and trends from this side of the Atlantic."You can also follow ReadWriteWeb Spain on Twitter @rwwes- and all of our country sites at the Twitter list rww/international.The opening post, translated in English here, was written by Jaime Garcia Cantero and is an in-depth look at Internet trends in Spain. Jaime Garcia Cantero is an associate of IDC Spain and assistant professor of IDG Communications of the EOI. He is considered to be one of Spain's most influential analysts.Discuss

  Microsoft's Bing now relies on Wolfram Alphato answer some of its users' questions. This is not a full integration of Wolfram Alpha into Bing, though. Instead, Bing only gets answers for queries about nutrition and math problems from Alpha. A query for "french fries" will still result in the standard search results page with a list of links, but a new compute tab in the left sidebar will open up results from Wolfram Alpha. Bing now also uses Alpha to compute queries related to Body Mass Index (BMI). In addition to this Wolfram Alpha integration, Bing now also features improved hover previews with Facebook integration and full page weather results.SponsorUpdate: in our briefing and later emails with Microsoft, the company told us that the integration with Wolfram Alpha would only consist on exchanging data about nutrition and that was reflected in the first version of this post. In today's blog post, however, Microsoft also announced that it will display math results from Alpha. We have updated this post accordingly.Bing tries to get users to the answers they are looking for faster than any other search engines and these new updates are all geared towards making things even easier for users.Wolfram Alpha Integration: That's It?We first learned about the integration with Alpha during a briefing with Stefan Weitz, Microsoft's Director of Bing, a few months ago. At that time, it was just a screenshot of Wolfram Alpha pasted onto the Bing interface. Rumors about this integration flared upin August, but anybody who expected a full integration between the two is bound to be disappointed by today's announcement. We can't help but wonder if the two teams aren't working on a deeper integration, though. Getting better information about nutrition and solutions to math problems in Bing is nice, but this is only a minor part of Alpha's feature set. Microsoft's vision for Bing is compatible with Wolfram's idea of Alpha as a 'computational knowledge engine.' The improved hover previews that Microsoft announced today go into a similar direction and Microsoft could potentially use the real estate in these preview boxes to showcase other results from Alpha in the future.Smarter Hover PreviewsHover previews are not new to Bing. In the current version, the little pop-ups that appear when a user hovers the mouse over the right-hand side of a search result only show a short excerpt from the page. The new previews use entity extraction to get information from the page that is related to the query. For businesses and restaurants, the new preview now also filters out information like street addresses, email addresses and phone numbers. When a Facebook page appears in the search results, Bing will now show the person's picture and users can see their networks and send a message or friend request from the preview box.The new preview box also shows a screenshot of the page and a list of popular links on that site. In addition, the preview now features another search box that allows users to quickly do a search within that particular site. Better WeatherBing now always displays weather information in the search results when it discovers a query for a town or city. Clicking on the link above the icon now takes users to a separate page with comprehensive weather information inside the Bing interface. The full page weather results show forecasts, satellite maps and historical averages.But there is More...This is clearly abusy week for Microsoft's Bing team and according to a Microsoft spokesperson, these are only some of the updates to Bing that Microsoft has planned for this week. Earlier updates this week included a number of changesto Bing Reference, which uses the technology Microsoft acquired from Powerset to semantically index Wikipedia. This feature can be accessed from the 'references' tab in the sidebar. We also wroteabout Microsoft's new interface and features from Bing Maps yesterday morning. Later in the day, Microsoft also updatedits video search, which now uses embeds to show videos from a wide variety of sites like Hulu, ABC and YouTube right on the Bing search results page.According to the latest data from Hitwise, Bing's market share in the US grew 7% last month and is now at 9.57%. While the current Wolfram Alpha integration won't bring new users to Bing, it does showcase that Microsoft is willing to try new things with Bing and we can only hope that this is just the beginning of a deeper integration between the two - though for the time being, this is a one-sided integration as Wolfram is still using Google as the fall-back search engine on Wolfram Alpha. Discuss

  Etelosis adopting OpenIDand Single Sign On(SSO) for its partners that sell business applications. The service will provide a single point of user authentication for business applications distributed through Etelos marketplaces. OpenID will primarily serve small business customers who use business applications from Etelos partners. OpenID will provide small businesses with an identity solution that gives them easier access to the applications they use. Etelos develops and operates private-labeled marketplaces for Web-based business applications such as Eventbriteand Box.net.SponsorSubscribers access what Etelos calls a User Management Interface (UMI). This console manages all of the application users for a small business subscriber. Using this system, they can access their application through a single sign on. They can link to their Web apps through a "single-user portal." OpenD is a decentralized standard for managing user names and passwords for single-logon access to web-based applications and social sites. It is supported by a number of companies including Google, IBM and Yahoo!OpenID has taken some time to establish itself but it did get a boost this summer when Google Appsadopted it. The adoption meant millions of schools, businesses and other organizations could use their Apps accounts as an OpenID. OpenID should see continued growth, especially as enterprise applications proliferate. OpenID and SSO's give providers like Etelos a way for its customers to offer a simple identity solution that simplifies the process for managing applications.Discuss