7 Precious Snowflakes That Almost Melted Away (Our Favorite Low Profile Stories This Week)
Every one of our blog posts around here is like a delicate, magical snowflake that we nurture lovingly (if quickly) before we push it out the door into the harsh lonely world of the web. Many of them are well received (otherwise we couldn't do this for a living) but sometimes we write something we're really proud of and it just melts into the river of news without being read by as many people as we wished. Thus we present to you, our staff's hand-picked posts this week that we think you may have missed but would likely enjoy quite a bit: Sponsor Frederic Lardinois has been covering the e-book market closely for months. This week he wrote up... E-Books: After the Hype and Before the iPad The e-book hype reached its apex just before the holiday season. Now seems like a good time to take a closer look at the e-book market, especially given that this business is heading for another disruption once Apple's iPad launches. Richard MacManus has been focusing on an emerging trend called The Internet of Things. Check out this interview he put up at the end of last month: Everyware: Interview with Adam Greenfield, Part 1 Last week I had the privilege of meeting Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. It's one of my favorite books about the Internet of Things and is still ahead of the curve, even though it was written in 2005 and published in 2006. Greenfield was in my city Wellington for the week, so I sat down with him at a local cafe to get his views on the current state of Internet of Things and where it's headed. Sarah Perez lives in Florida and she's regularly got super smart content posted before the rest of us have even rolled out of bed in the morning. Her latest sleeper fave? Beyond Twitter Search: Semantic Analysis of the Real-Time Web Many of you probably never heard of the Ellerdale project until this week, when Twitter announced it was one of the company's new partners in receiving the "firehose" of Twitter data, a full feed stream of tweets that was, prior to Monday, only available to the major players like Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft. What Ellerdale is now doing with Twitter's 50 million tweets per day is definitely interesting - the service uses an intelligent data-parsing engine to analyze the context of tweets and the links they contain and combines that with other data sources like RSS feeds and Wikipedia to create a real-time search engine and trends tracker that provides more than just a list of tweets - it provides an understanding of the world's conversations. What would a new newsman say is news if a new newsman could say news was news? We asked Mike Melanson, our newest addition to the news writing team. He said his favorite under-read post this week was... Ads with Eyes: Keeping Digital Signage in Check While geolocation based services have been in the forefront of our minds lately, with websites like PleaseRobMe making us second guess announcing our whereabouts, another industry has been quietly ramping up its data collection practices. The Center for Democracy & Technology issued a report yesterday addressing the growing "digital signage" industry, suggesting a number of privacy practices it might adopt. Alex Williams helps make Enterprise tech news interesting and he posted some very important coverage of enterprise innovation this week in.... Will StatusNet Be Another Open-Source Star in the Enterprise? What a week for StatusNet, the open-source, microblogging service that serves as the foundation for identi.ca, one of the first services to emerge as a focal player in the movement around the real-time Web. Last week, the company launched StatusNet Enterprise Network, a microblogging service with a support program for the corporate market. Initial customers include Motorola Corporation and Canonical Ltd. Kaliya Hamlin is a frequent guest contributor, events partner and friend of the family here at ReadWriteWeb. She wrote a great post this week titled... Bending the Identity Spectrum: Verifiable Anonymity at RSA Today at the RSA security conference in San Francisco, Microsoft's Corporate VP of Trustworthy Computing, Scott Charney, spoke - opening his talk with this question: "Do you want anonymity or accountability? YES!" But how can you have both? I created a spectrum of identity to help understand the different forms that exist on the internet. On one end is Anonymous Identity. Basically you use an account or identifier every time go to a Web site - no persistence, no way to connect the search you did last week with the one you did this week. Finally, my personal pick from my own archive. I've been having a great time writing up narrative tales of leading technology innovators. This is one you may not be familiar with but I think it's really a moving and important story. What Does it Mean to Make 5 Million Maps? Platial's Legacy It's not every day that a business shuts down but declares itself a success in helping kick off an unstoppable movement to change the world. Community mapping service Platial announced this week that it is turning off its servers and asking users to move their content onto the servers of other providers. Just short of 5 years old, Platial raised some venture capital, bought other small companies and made a name for itself, but in the end wasn't able to build a business. Co-founder Di-Ann Eisnor defiantly says that Platial changed the world anyway. Cartography used to be an elite practice of drawing borders around resources and power. Platial helped transform it into an accessible practice for millions of people to share how they have experienced the world around them. Those are our picks for this week! Come back daily for the best tech blog coverage we can provide. Snowflake photo CC by Flickr user YellowCloud Discuss
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7 Precious Snowflakes That Almost Melted Away (Our Favorite Low Profile Stories This Week)
