There are more and more ways to get your instant messaging done, with a large number of new online and offline clients from third parties. With so many instant messaging options, it's hard to figure out which one to use Below, we've listed a large number of online and offline instant messengers, as well the various protocols supported by each, so that you can more easily find the one that's right for you. There's really not all that much difference between each except in interface and supported protocols. The best option for you will likely be the one that supports the networks your friends connect to and has an interface that you feel comfortable using. If there are any we've missed, please mention them in the comments. (Note: we did not link to any official offline clients.)Online ClientsName: MeeboSupports: AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, GTalk, ICQ, JabberName: FlickIMSupports: AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, GTalk, ICQ, JabberName: Kool IMSupports: AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, GTalk, ICQ, Gadu-Gadu, XfireName: eBuddySupports: AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, GTalk, MySpaceName: ILoveIMSupports: AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, GTalk, webcamsName: RadiusIMSupports: AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, GTalkName:Imo.imSupports: AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, GTalkName: MabberSupports: Proprietary (aimed at mobiles)Name: IMUnitiveSupports: AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, gim (proprietary)Name: SnimmerSupports: AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, GTalk, ICQ, JabberName: EasyMessengerSupports: AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ, JabberName: MessengerFXSupports: MSNName: IMhahaSupports: AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, QQName: Google TalkSupports: GTalk, JabberName: Yahoo! Web Messenger (web.im)Supports: Yahoo!, MSNName: MSN Web MessengerSupports: Yahoo!, MSNName: AIM ExpressSupports: AIMName: ICQ2GoSupports: ICQName: JWChat - Jabber Web ChatSupports: JabberName: Trillian Astra (closed alpha)Supports: AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, GTalk, ICQ, Jabber, MySpace, iChatOffline ClientsName: TrillianSupports: AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, GTalk, ICQ, IRCPlatforms: WindowsName: PidginSupports: AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, GTalk, ICQ, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, QQ, MySpace, iChat, IRC, Lotus, NovellPlatforms: Windows, UNIXName: AdiumSupports: AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, GTalk, ICQ, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, QQ, iChat, Lotus, Novell, LiveJournalPlatforms: Mac OS XName: AirTalkerSupports: AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, GTalk, ICQ, Jabber, MySpace, Friendster, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, bloggingPlatforms: Windows, Mac OS X (via Adobe AIR), also has web version

  Comedic web animation house and video sharing site JibJabhas raised a second round of funding; this $3m B round from previous investors Polaris Venture Partners makes more than $6m total the company has banked from investors. Credit for breaking the specific amount of funding goes to Dan Primack at PeHub, who is the manwhen it comes to digging up financial information.$6 Million for Web Cartoons?It might sound crazy, but today's JibJab B round is just the latest chapter in an evolving story. Professional content production companies are getting funded left and right. While this was supposed to be the beginning of the era of user generated video - the reality shaking out is more complicated than that. Specifically, advertisers are just not comfortable with the brand risk inherent in user generated content. That is changing slowly and it may continue to over time - but there's likely to be a huge market for shops like JibJab long into the future. Likewise, video tools are now commodities and it's all about the content you've got in your video service. Professional content is good, professional humor is great, say investors.Witness the following, for example. Will Ferrell's Funny or Dieraised millions from Google backers Sequia and launched in April. Media analyst Jeff Jarvis investedin Black20, a small comedy video troup, in May. And venture funded ad sales network SpotRunnerspent some of its VC money on funding its own original content creation company, 60frames. Ad networks creating their own content companies is something that's liable to happen more than once. Finally, everyone from Michael Eisner to MySpace is now making original, serialized, short-form, soft-porn drivel. That's the future - those adjectives right there.Perhaps then at a time when Content is King again and bad content ismaking a princely effort of its own, we should be thankful that JibJab will be able now to double its capacity with this newest round of investment. JibJab might even be called relatively sophisticated- relative to most similar endeavors making money in online video these days. More than a blip in the news, the funding news is a highlight in one of the most important trends online.

  ChoiceAis a new site for do it yourself, or For Sale By Owner, real estate listings. It's got a nice, simple interface that makes good use of new web technologies and it's quite pleasing to peruse the limited listings collected prelaunch. Those listings are free to post and so far are primarily based around the Pacific Northwest of the US.Reators, though, may prove to be a case study of one of those industry roles that just can't be replaced by the internet.Will People Go For It?As nice as the site is, real estate may not prove to be an industry that the internet is able to totally disintermediate. I asked Joel Burslem, founder of the Future of Real Estate Marketingblog, for his perspective on ChoiceA and its goals; he was dubious about both the large-scale viability of the For Sale by Owner market in general and the ability for any website to succeed in it. "Are the services of realtors worth 6%? Are there some unscrupulous people in the business as realtors? These are important questions to ask," he said, "but this has been tried many times before. Past experience and market surveys show that the vast majority of people engaging in real estate transactions will end up using a realtor." Burslem cited a compelling list of reasons why this was the case, including the complexity of the deals and the importance of scaling and visibility. He said that real estate megasite Zillow, for example, tried to focus on for sale by owner listingsat the beginning but quickly learned that it had to go after realtors if it wanted to offer a substantial number of listings at all.What does ChoiceA say about this? This angel-funded, two man startup says they believe it's only a matter of time until someone upsets or at least challenges the dominance of the MLS listings and professional realtors. They are putting their emphasis on an accessible user interface and they allow cross-posting to Craigslist. Using Amazon web services, ChoiceA is keeping costs low to hold out until the market shifts. They are planning on running some advertisements on site and may in the end take a very small fee for listings.It is Easy on the EyesThe interface really is nice, including a drag and drop favorites list, a nice lightbox gallery and various sliders and maps. It's nothing revolutionary but it's very friendly. The company also went to great lengths, they say, to put together web friendly legal forms for real estate transactions in various states. They encourage people to hire a lawyer to review the documents they use throughout the transaction - at a fraction of the cost a realtor would incur.Will people do it? They might, and ChoiceAcould be the one effort in many to succeed in this big goal of disintermediating real estate, but unlike some industries like music and movies - cutting out the middleman in this market will be no easy task.

  In May 2006, eBay quietly acquired a microfinance company called MicroPlace, which it said was part ofan "ongoing initiative ... focused on maximizing our corporate resources to continue to drive social good through a variety of innovative programs." A year and a half later, MicroPlace has finally officially opened its doors to investors.MicroPlace is similar to Kiva.org(which we've written abouttwice this year), and allows investors in developed nations to support microloans for entrepreneurs in developing areas of the world. The difference between Kiva.org and MicroPlace, is that in eBay's version investors can make a return on their money.People purchase investments from third-party security issuers like Oikocredit-USA and the Calvert Foundation through MicroPlace. Those security issuers then use the funds to work with local lending organizations who grant loans to working poor in developing nations. Initial loans are typically between $30 and $200 and have 3-6 month repayment plans. Unlike Kiva.org, however, which does not charge interest to borrowers on its loans, eBay's MicroPlace is out to turn a profit while helping people establish credit and start businesses. The microfinance lenders they work with typically charge between 18% and 60% interest on loans, according to the site."Capital markets are just waking up to this asset class," Tracey Pettengill Turner, the founder and general manager of MicroPlace, told Reuters. "This is different because it is the first Web-based service for the everyday investor to invest in microfinance, and earn an investment return while addressing global poverty."It looks like investments on MicroPlace typically pay out 1.5-3.0% per year to investors. That is hardly a mammoth return on your money, but certainly any return might be enough to entice users who were hestitant to tie up their money in riskier, no return investments through sites like Kiva.org. While MicroPlace is less personal -- since you're working with third parties you never get to see directly who is benefiting from your investment (though there are a few borrower profiles available) -- the site does do a good job of getting general information out about financial and social issues in the nations it works with.Though their approach is different, and perhaps slightly less admirable, than similar web sites, MicroPlace is nonetheless trying to do some good by providing microloans to people in developing nations that need financial assistance. The prospect of making a small return on your investment may attract more users, as well. The net result of that would be more money available for people in poor nations, which is certainly a good thing.

  The New York Post reportsthat Google is currently leading Microsoft in the quest to win a 5-10% stake in Facebook for $500 million to $1.5 billion (depending on what exorbitant pre-money valuation Facebook gets). According to the Post's source at Microsoft, however, Redmond is "willing to give any valuation possible" to keep Google from nabbing a stake in the hot social networking startup.It's hard not to take the NY Post story with a grain a salt, though, given that Post reporter Peter Lauria has been quite wrong about this type of rumorbefore. Both Google's and Microsoft's interest in Facebook is based on the potential for a large amount of advertising dollars that can be made in social networking. Microsoft has often been presumed to be the front-runner, given their current advertising deal with Facebook. Either way, one of these companies seems like to invest a large amount of money in the social network.Facebook, meanwhile, seems to have plans of their own in the advertising realm. The company will be making an announcement to advertisers about what they're calling"a new way of advertising online" on November 6th in New York. Radar Online is reportingthat Facebook has already invited an impressive list of companies to be "Landmark Partners" at $300,000 a pop to help launch the new system. The list includes Condé Nast, Nike, Apple, Sony, General Motors, Coke, CBS, Chase, and Verizon.If Lauria is right, we should find out soon: the Post reports that an announcement about a Facebook investment from either Google or Microsoft should come within the next 24-48 hours.Image: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

  Live from S.D.Click for "Tweets from S.D.".Powered by RSS Feed DigestThere's been lots of coverage around the web today of the role that social media is playing in reporting about the wildfires in Southern California. Twitter and Google Mapshave received the most coverage but there are probably infinite permutations of those two tools and others, as well. One tool that just happened to launch today is TwitterWhere, a service that makes tracking Tweets from any location easy to do. I couldn't help but think of San Diego when I saw it.You provide the location, by city, state or postal code, then provide a proximity radius and TwitterWhere will create an RSS feed of all the Tweets from Twitter users within that area. Here on the right is the live feed of the most recent items from within 50 miles of San Diego.TwitterWhere was built by Portland developer Matt King, co-founder of the happy-hour geo-locator Unthirsty, and first coverage of the service was on Silicon Florist- a blog that covers the tech community in the hotbed of innovation that I just happen to live in, Portland, Oregon.Our thoughts go out to the people driven from their homes by wildfires in the area, the last report we heard that they were numbered more than 1 million. Some (including myself) believe that this sort of event is likely to occur with greater frequency in the future due to ecological imbalance; one thing that's not disputable though is that social media will play an increasingly important role in media coverage of events like this.

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/music/Jango_s_Social_Music_Service_Shines_In_a_Crowded_Market';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Jangois a social music site that's launching formally in the middle of next month, but has decided to reach out to blogs for coverage now. Apparently a company with an enlarged sense of proportion all along, Jango says its private beta has 300,000 users. Yet it's stayed off the radar of all the leading web 2.0 review blogs to date. Read/WriteWeb readers who click through this linkcan access the closed beta.You'll be prompted to create an account after you enter your first artist search.It's a good looking service. Think Last.fmwith more social features and more AJAX. Think Pandorawith profiles brought to the front and more control over the playlist.Read on for more info about the interesting founders, the interface and the recommendation engine.Jango was founded by an international band of mysterious outlaws; they participated in the first bubble, including in European giant portal Spray and "monopoly cable TV stations" in Armenia and "their arch rival country" Azerbijan. I said they were outlaws. The six co-founders self-funded the New York based company until yesterday when they closed a $1 million angel round from undisclosed investors. There is, in fact, more AJAX than you can shake a stick at. There's not a pop-up player per se, but there is some song and channel continuity across pages. This doesn't appear to be AJAX, it's quite interesting in fact, but I like it.There's a lot that's not finished at Jango yet (after all, it's still in private beta with only 300,000 users -lol) but the single biggest thing you'll notice is the superior control over the playlist. You can skip around to related songs played past and in the future - you're not at the mercy of the tireless advance of the stream ala Pandora. It's quite nice. Unsigned music industry blog The Hippodromegot in on the beta and says that they didn't discover anything new on Jango. Jango is paying an internet radio station license to SoundExchange, ASCAP and BMI and populates its library via manual collection (they buy CDs). Commercial popularity, editorial selection and "people who like" recommendations all go together to determine Jango's recommendations.The social music market is a crowded one, but it looks like Jango has learned from its quicker competitors and has launched a very nice service.

  There is renewed interest in bootstrapping, if only because lower costs now make this a bit easier and younger entrepreneurs can live more cheaply. Here then is my 10 point bootstrapping primer:1. It does NOT mean self-funded. The real bootstrappers put in peanuts of their own money. Bootstrapping means funding with customer revenues.2. Bootstrapping is NOT compatible with the “build traffic and worry about monetization later” idea. Get external capital to enable that. Bootstrapping is usually for selling to businesses, not to consumers. Just maybe, you can bootstrap a consumer advertising play using Amazon S3/EC2 infrastructure and Adsense (or an alternative for revenue). But has anybody done that, really?3. It is very hard work, stressful and uncertain. Don’t start down this road unless you are really prepared for this.4. It is messy. You get pulled by clients in different directions. Managed well, this is great and you get real world input. Managed badly, you end up without a coherent product or strategy. My rule is: 3 custom jobs to get to a product, iterating and abstracting each time. It's like sailing - you know the direction, but you tack left and right to catch the wind.5. You need a sign over your desk to remind you about your 3 top priorities - cash flow, cash flow and cash flow.6. Don’t bootstrap and then raise VC. The VC will stress how much he admires your guts and determination (while secretly thinking “phew, glad I don’t have to do that”) but the current revenues won’t impact the valuation nearly as much as you think. You either get valued on your revenues or your plan, but the mix is hard. Bootstrap and then sell. With your own capital and that track record you are in the game.7. Don’t trade equity for services. It's really just a VC round in disguise and the better vendors won’t do it (they don’t need to), so you get weak vendors who drop you when they get a cash deal. With some smaller, entrepreneurial services vendors, it's good to do cash plus an equity “kicker” as motivation - to get the best people. Whether this is onshore or offshore does not make any difference.8. You can get external sales people on a mostly success basis, but you have to put up some cash to be credible and you have to give up big % and with evergreen clauses so the sales person gets some annuity revenue. This way you get the sales people who know how to pick the low hanging fruit quickly and easily - which is what you need.9. This is different from building a prototype proof of concept to get funding. That is viable and you can do it by moonlighting, or friends and family money, but it is not customer funding and not bootstrapping. It is a “self funding bridge to VC”. Without a track record that's what you have to do. With a track record, VC will fund from day one.10. Learn how to juggle credit card offers. As long as you really do have revenue and just a working capital cash flow gap (between getting paid and payments you have to make) this is quite viable. You can keep getting those 0% intro offers and then swap around. It takes a bit of organization and effort, but it's the best free money out there. Then a few years later you can get a bank line of credit.ConclusionMost of the software industry started by bootstrapping - think Microsoft, Oracle, SAP. A few online ventures such as eBay also worked this way; they took VC money, but did not need to. On the other hand, no tradditional media business that I know ever got bootstrapped. It is horses for courses. Some businesses are ideal for bootstrapping and some not so. More importantly, some entrepreneurs are ideally suited to bootstrapping and others are not.Pic: ChrisDag

  Boston-based Kinsetyesterday announced the launch of their flagship 3D virtual world shopping platform. The downloadable Kinset client loads up a virtual shopping mall that looks and feels rather similar to Second Life, sans the interaction with other humans (though I couldn't tell if that was part of the experience, or simply because no people were using the software yet).During the public beta period, Kinset is operating two stores, BunchaBooks and 'LectricTown, both fed by Amazon. Browsing the virtual shelves was easy enough, if a bit clunky. Mousing over fuzzy product images brought up additional information in the sidebar, and pressing F7 adds a product to your shopping cart. I couldn't figure out how to actually purchase products, and Kinset froze up before I had a chance to try to figure it out. Needless to say, I wasn't very compelled to put much more effort into finding out.The big question is why? Shopping on traditional 2D sites like Amazon offers users clearer and more numerous images of products, as well as the same information. Some sites even offer 3D animated views of products, and many ecommerce sites use products like Adobe's Scene7to deliver high quality product photos that Kinset can't compete with. Further, shopping on traditional web sites is faster, generally makes it easier to find specific items, and anyone who wants to set up shop in a virtual world can choose from more established players in the market, such as Second Life.And, to make matters worse, after all the hype surrounding ecommerce in virtual worlds, it hasn't panned outfor many companies. But in spite of all that, Kinset has managed to rope in two high profile clients. Brookstonewill open a Kinset store in November and Tweetercould have a store open on their platform by the end of January. The reason, according to the Boston Globe, appears to be all about control.Your friendly, er, asleep 'LectroTown sales rep..."Brookstone vice president Greg Sweeney says he'd considered building a store in Second Life, where such retailers as Sears have set up shop, but he was concerned that it wouldn't give him 'enough control in being able to shape the experience,'" writes the Globe's Scott Kirsner. Tweeter also considered Second Life or There.com, but decided the experience was "too clunky," reports the paper.Kinset is founded by serial entrepreneur John Butler whose first startup, publicly-traded Applix Inc., sold for $339 million this month, and by Scott Evernden. It is self-funded.

  One week after suffering a major blowto its infamous "1-Click" shopping patent, Amazon.com has been awarded what's sure to be seen as its latest bit of highly obnoxious IP. The company has been awarded a patenton the practice of "including a search string at the end of a URL without any special formatting." According to the text of the patent, it covers a technology serving the following circumstances: "a user wishing to search for 'San Francisco Hotels' may do by simply accessing the URL www.domain_name/San Francisco Hotels, where domain_name is a domain name associated with the web site system."There's smart conversation about the patent's flaws over at Slashdot, as usual, but the problems here are probably obvious. Filed in August of 2004, the practice no doubt touches on any number of "prior arts" and it's fairly obvious. Non-obviousness - which you can probably search for via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/non_obviousness (if you'll forgive me for saying so, Amazon) is a key criteria in the granting of patents. Amazon may in the end be one of the leading factors in the eventual overhaul of the internet technology department at the US Patent office.

  digg_url = 'http://www.digg.com/tech_news/Google_vs_Systran_Mountain_View_Does_Their_Own_Translation';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Google Operating Systemis reporting that Google has switched to its own in house translation system for all 25 available language pairs. Previously, the site used Systran for almost all of its translation processing, turning to its in house software only for Arabic, Chinese, and Russian. AltaVista's Babelfish, one of the first and most well-known online translation services, still uses Systran for language processing.I thought I would put the two head-to-head to see which produced better results. Unfortunately, my high school Spanish has grown a bit rusty, and English is the only language in which I am proficient (if you can call this proficient). So translating from English to another language would do me no good. For this test, I visited Project Gutenbergand downloaded two versions of "Pierre et Jean" by Guy de Maupassant, one of my favorite writers, one in the original French and the other an English translation. I then fed the same passage, in French, through both translators.Here are the original passages:Original French: Dès qu'il fut dehors, Pierre se dirigea vers la rue de Paris, la principale rue du Havre, éclairée, animée, bruyante. L'air un peu frais des bords de mer lui caressait la figure, et il marchait lentement, la canne sous le bras, les mains derrière le dos. Il se sentait mal à l'aise, alourdi, mécontent comme lorsqu'on a reçu quelque fâcheuse nouvelle. Aucune pensée précise ne l'affligeait et il n'aurait su dire tout d'abord d'où lui venait cette pesanteur de l'âme et cet engourdissement du corps. Il avait mal quelque part, sans savoir où; il portait en lui un petit point douloureux, une de ces presque insensibles meurtrissures dont on ne trouve pas la place, mais qui gênent, fatiguent, attristent, irritent, une souffrance inconnue et légère, quelque chose comme une graine de chagrin.English (human translation): As soon as he got out, Pierre made his way to the Rue de Paris, the high-street of Havre, brightly lighted up, lively and noisy. The rather sharp air of the seacoast kissed his face, and he walked slowly, his stick under his arm and his hands behind his back. He was ill at ease, oppressed, out of heart, as one is after hearing unpleasant tidings. He was not distressed by any definite thought, and he would have beenpuzzled to account, on the spur of the moment, for this dejection of spirit and heaviness of limb. He was hurt somewhere, without knowing where; somewhere within him there was a pin-point of pain -- one of those almost imperceptible wounds which we cannot lay a finger on, but which incommode us, tire us, depress us, irritate us -- a slight and occult pang, as it were a small seed of distress.And here are the translated versions (from French):AltaVista Babelfish: As soon as it was outside, Pierre moved towards the street of Paris, the principal street of Le Havre, lit, animated, noisy. The a little fresh air of the edges of sea cherished the figure to him, and it went slowly, the cane under the arm, the hands behind the back. It was smelled badly at ease, weighed down, dissatisfied like when one received some annoying news. No thought specifies did not afflict it and it would not have known to say first of all from where this gravity came to him from the heart and this numbness from the body. It had some share badly, without knowing where; it carried in him a small painful point, one of these almost insensitive bruises which one does not find the place, but which obstructs, tire, sadden, irritate, an unknown and light suffering, something like a seed of sorrow.Google Translate: When he was outside, Pierre went to the streets of Paris, the main street of Le Havre, lighted, busy, busy. The air of a little fresh seashores figure caressed him, and he walked slowly, cane under his arm, hands behind their backs. He felt uncomfortable weight, as unhappy when received some disturbing news. No precise thought it sad and knew he would say first of all that this was due gravity of the soul and the numbness of the body. He had badly somewhere without knowing where; He wore it a little painful point, one of these almost insensitive bruises which are not found instead, but the way, tired, sadden, irritate, suffering and unknown slight, some something like a seed of sorrow.I think we can be confident in saying that machine translation still can't compete with human. Both Google and AltaVista get a lot wrong and have some strange output ("It was smelled badly at ease?"), and each get some things surprisingly close. Neither, though, would be suitable for more than trying to gain a quick, cursory understanding of something written in an unfamiliar language. Real translation is still best left to the people who are fluent in the languages in question.What do you think of our test, though? Which site do you feel came up with the best translation? Will you use one over the other?

  Fresh on the heels of yesterday's news about the raid and arrestof the founder of TVLinks.co.uk by British police, comes wordthat British and Dutch police raided the servers of invite-only public torrent tracker OiNK.cd (formerly OiNK.me.uk) and arrested the site's 24-year-old server admin.According to the BBC, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) had been investigating OiNK for two years. OiNK's servers, which were located in Amsterdam, were apparently seized during a series of raids by Dutch police and coordinated by Interpol last week, while the site's founder was arrested this morning in the UK. OiNK supposedly had hundreds of thousands of members and hosted a very large number of torrents. According to the IFPI, it was one of the main sources for leaked, pre-release music on the Internet, responsible for leaking 60 major albums this year. "BitTorrent has fast become the most popular file sharing client, and while the technology is now commonplace, closed criminal networks such as OiNK take time to develop; make no mistake, this operation will cause major disruption to this illegal activity," predicted BPI's Geoff Taylor. "The government is now well aware of the scale of damage this theft causes to music -- copyright theft starves the creative industries of income, which both threatens future investment in artists and vandalises our culture."The employer of OiNK's unnamed admin, as well as the home of his father, were also raided by British police.

  Last week I attended the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. This is the third year running I've attended - I went to the 2005 Web 2.0 Conferencein October 2005, the 2006 Web 2.0 Summitin November 2006 (it was re-named the "Summit" at that point and took on a more business focus), the 2007 Web 2.0 Expoin April 2007 (more developer focused), and now the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit. Each time I've written a round-up (see links above), a high level look at how the events panned out. For some reason, the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit has been harder for me to analyze than the previous 3 events. I think it's partly because I spent less time this year in the sessions and workshops - this time I roamed around the conference center and did lots of meetings. But also it was difficult to identify an over-riding theme to this conference. Web 2.0 Conferences 2005-06To quickly re-cap my thoughts on the previous conferences:The 2004 conference, which I attended virtually, was the awakening of a new Web era. Tim O'Reilly and his team defined this as Web 2.0. The 2005 conference was all about the excitement of new web startups making an impact on the Internet again, for the first time since the dot com era. At the same time people were wary about how the dot com era ended, so it wasn't the "irrational exuberance" of the previous era. I termed the moodat this event "cautious optimism and cynical buzz". The 2006 conference was re-named Web 2.0 Summit and had a much bigger business focus than the previous year - I noted that"the crowd was overwhelmingly from the media and business worlds." I also wrote that the 2006 conference was less cutting edge and lacked a creative vibe. However there was an over-riding theme to it: Web technologies were maturing. Things like Amazon's web services initiatives, desktop/web integration, big media using the Web, and more.The Web 2.0 Expo in April 2007 was a lot bigger than the previous two, in terms of audience. It also had the developer and designer crowd in attendance, which helped bring some of the excitement back. The Expo Hall, teeming with startups and big tech companies alike, was the highlight. My over-riding impressionwas: Web 2.0 goes mainstream.So there has been a progression over the past couple of years:Oct '04: Web 2.0 is BornOct '05: Web 2.0 Tips (a.k.a. "cautious optimism and cynical buzz")Nov '06: Web 2.0 MaturesApr '06: Web 2.0 Goes MainstreamReviewing the 2007 Web 2.0 SummitAnd now we come to the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit -- but this one is harder to to define. For a start, the cutting edge was even further away from the Summit than it was in 2006. The main themes that I picked up during this conference were: Social networking (especially Facebook); andThe iPhone - which was seemingly carried by at least 1 out of every 2 conference participants.Two interesting trends to be sure, but not the cutting edge of web technology. The hallways were where the action was, as usualHowever, one innovative new product type did make an appearance later in the conference: semantic apps. Twine announced itselfduring the Summit, and we saw on stagetwo startups that have been in varying stages of stealth for the past year or so: Freeweb and Powerset. So it was good to see semantic apps 'bubbling up' (obligatory use of the word 'bubble', just for Josh Kopelman).Something was missing in the Web 2.0 Summit in 2007. The excitement factor wasn't quite there. Content-wise, discussing Facebook's valuation and the latest AT&T regulations weren't very interesting from a technology perspective. Marc Canter did his best to liven things up, asking bothFacebook and MySpace's leaders to open up their social network properties. But even Marc couldn't elicit meaningful responses from either Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg(who frankly looked like a young deer trapped in headlights) or the Batman and Robin big media duo of Rupert Murdoch and Chris DeWolfe. As for the social activity at the Web 2.0 Summit, it too didn't quite register on the excitement meter. Last year we got Lou Reed, somewhat grizzled at how fate (or his AOL kung-fu buddy Jonathan Miller) had reduced him to performing to rich Internet folks. OK, Lou sold out - but it was awesome! This year however there was no Jonathan Miller to save the day. Indeed the main party wasn't even hosted by Web 2.0 Summit. It was by MySpace and it basically threw together two different worlds: awkward looking geeks mixing with far-too-hip media people.Who let these geeks in? At the MySpace party, from left to right: Prashant Agarwal, Richard MacManus, Sean Ammirati Conclusion: Steady As She GoesAfter much earnest reflection, I think this year's Web 2.0 Summit can be described as: Steady As She Goes. Nothing much had changed from last year's Summit - even Tim O'Reilly's attire of brown trousers/jacket and scratchy beard was the same as last year. No, this Web 2.0 thing is here to stay for a couple more years yet - Mary Meeker's data and chartsstill show web 2.0 in the black, John Battelle's questions are still incisive, Tim O'Reilly is still at the top of his analytical game (web 2.0 and financial markets was his new theme this year). It's steady as she goes.There was a hint of disruption with the Semantic Apps startups, muscling onto the scene with their talk of "web 3.0". But in the end, it wasn't enough to usurp the defining question of this conference: when will Facebook "bring in a grown-up"?(which Battelle asked Zuckerberg at the end of their session).Hey, perhaps next year we can get Jack White and The Raconteurs to perform at the event?Photos: Brian Solis

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/programming/The_Semantic_Web_is_Here_AdaptiveBlue_Releases_Automatic_SmartLinks';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';AdaptiveBluemakers of the popular Firefox plugin, BlueOrganizer, has launched a new version of their SmartLinks product that makes it easy for blog and web site publishers to include the links automatically within their pages. Previously, SmartLinks were only accessible via the BlueOrganizer. Now, web site publishers can add SmartLinks to their page and the service will parse them automatically.SmartLinks are browser popups, similar to the Snap Shotsproduct that we use on this blog, that add additional contextual information to certain types of links, including links to books, movies, music, stocks, and wine. AdaptiveBlue supports a large list of top web sites, automatically recognizing and augmenting links to those properties.Though the comparison to Snap's product is inevitable, SmartLinks are fairly dissimilar. While Snap's product adds popups to every link on the page and offers just content previews, SmartLinks are added only to the links it understands and for which is has additional information it can add. The info contained in the contextual popups generally includes links to additional sources and basic information on the everyday item being linked to. For example, a music SmartLink will contain links to the album on iTunes, Last.fm, and Amazon, links to sources for lyrics, reviews, videos, and photos as well as a brief profile of the artist.SmartLinks also include ways to share the item being linked to on popular social sites. All the big sites, and most of the small sites, are represented, but these links are also contextual. A SmartLink popup for a book, for example, will include links to save the book on Shelfari and LibraryThing, while a SmartLink for a music artist will include links for creating stations on Last.fm or Pandora. The list of which sites are supported both within and by SmartLinks is currently controlled by AdaptiveBlue, who say they will respond to community feedback when deciding when and if to add new ones. Founder and CEO Alex Iskold told me today that the idea is not to overwhelm users, so rather than support every site under the sun, the company plans to hopefully pick and choose from among the best.Installing SmartLinks is just a matter of copying a single line of Javascript. The company has also created 1-click installs for Blogger and TypePad, and a plugin for Wordpress.What's in it for site owners? Beyond the added value that SmartLinks provides for users by wrapping certain links with additional contextual information, site owners can monetize the links in the popups by providing affiliate IDs (affiliate links are how AdaptiveBlue currently monetizes the service). Further, users of the BlueOrganizer addon for Firefox will benefit from added integration that makes it easier to save links to their organizer. AdaptiveBlue has a "try before you buy" preview on their web sitethat allows publishers to see what their sites would look like with SmartLinks enabled.In the title I mentioned the Top-Down Semantic Web, which is something that Alex Iskold has written about on this blog. Alex is eating his own dog food, so to speak, by releasing a product that buys directly into the concept. AdaptiveBlue's SmartLinks essentially works in the way that Alex described the Top-Down Semantic Web, by understanding specific types of information (in this case links) and wrapping them with additional data. SmartLinks takes unstructured information and turns it into structured information by understanding a basic item on the web and adding semantics to it.Full disclosure: AdaptiveBlue Founder and CEO Alex Iskoldis a regular contributor to Read/WriteWeb, and AdaptiveBlue is currently a sponsor of this site.