Our top story this week was "Digg's iPhone App Might Be Better Than the Website." The review? The app is a little buggy, lacks features, but is still quite good. Read on for our coverage and analysis. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010, including Real-Time Web, Mobile Web and Internet of Things. Note: We've refreshed the format for our longest running feature, the Weekly Wrapup. It now focuses more explicitly on the key trends that ReadWriteWeb is tracking in 2010, as well as giving you the highlights from the leading story of the week. Let us know your thoughts on the new format. Sponsor Story of the Week: Digg's iPhone App Digg's iPhone App Might Be Better Than the Website More Twitter Analysis: Influencers Don't Retweet Can You Hear Me Now? Check This Crowd-Sourced Mobile Coverage Map Inventor of the Web Gets Backing to Build Web of Data Twitter Hacker, TechCrunch Document Leaker, Arrested in France (UPDATED) More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb Announcing the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit Join us for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7 in Mountain View, California as we explore the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Be a part of the discussion on geo-location services , augmented reality , native app vs. browser-based , commerce and marketing , mobile social networking and the Internet of Things. Sponsorship enquiries: sales@readwriteweb.com , Register now for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit and get early bird rates - only $295. Mobile Web Opera for the iPhone? We Sure Hope So. Google Voice Goes Real-Time (Well, Almost) That's Not a Phone, It's a Tiny Computer: Global Mobile Data Surpasses Voice More Mobile Web coverage Augmented Reality Augmented Reality Among Time's 10 Tech Trends for 2010 Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Our Newest Research Report More Augmented Reality coverage Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Our Newest Research Report We're pleased to announce ReadWriteWeb's latest premium report, Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Analysis of the Leaders, the Challenges and the Future . This report will help you develop a sophisticated understanding of Augmented Reality (AR), the mobile and Web technology that places data on top of a user's view of the physical world. The research included will help you decrease your AR development time to market by learning from the first wave of early adopters. AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more in 2010. In this report, we profile key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. For more information or to buy the report, visit here . Real-Time Web My6Sense Releases API: 'Digital Intuition' for the Real-Time Web More Real-Time Web coverage . Don't miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb's report, The Real-Time Web and its Future . Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app . As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we've made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes . ReadWriteStart Our channel ReadWriteStart , sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark , is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. What Does Health Care Reform Mean for Startups and VCs? How Entrepreneurs Can Make Better Use of Email The Art of the VC Pitch: A Roundup of Advice from 6 VCs ReadWriteEnterprise Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations. IBM Partners To Offer $190 Cloud-Connected Netbook For Emerging Markets Microsoft Testing OfficeTalk - Microblogging Service Much Like Twitter ReadWriteCloud Our channel ReadWriteCloud , sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing. Canonical Ubuntu One Music Service Goes Into Public Beta Dell: Build Your Own Cloud Enterprise Cloud Control: Q&A with Eucalyptus CTO Dr. Rich Wolski That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone. Discuss
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and prominent researcher Nigel Shadbolt will lead a new British Institute for Web Science with $45 million in government backing. The announcement was not without its critics, but the Institute could have a world-wide impact. The two men collaborated in helping build the excellent data.gov.uk and will now expand upon that work. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said of the move : "We are determined to go further in breaking down the walled garden of Government...This Institute will help place the UK at the cutting edge of research on the Semantic Web and other emerging web and internet technologies." Sponsor Understanding the Web of Data Berners-Lee said two years ago last month that all the pieces were in place to build the semantic web, a paradigm based on giving structured meaning to and clear links between otherwise unstructured content floating around the web. Many people believe that a web with semantic structure will be the same type of boon to innovation that common standards like HTML have been. Berners-Lee famously described his vision of the semantic web like this: I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web - the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A 'Semantic Web', which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The 'intelligent agents' people have touted for ages will finally materialize. Today's announcement came along government calls to build super-fast broadband to every home in the UK. Prime Minister Brown claimed that such a development could foster economic development and as many as 250,000 new jobs. As writer Tom Foremski pointed out this morning about the Web Science Institute, however "internet technologies have resulted in fewer jobs created than have been lost -- which is the way of all disruptive technologies." Making the Vision Real is Hard, Too Super-fast broadband to every home is a much easier thing to sell to the public than a future-web of structured, machine-readable data. After years of expectations, the semantic web remains in search of its clearly comprehensible killer-app. Earlier this month, semantic social bookmarking service Twine quietly slid into obscurity and was bought up by news recommendation service Evri . Twine was said to be possibly "the first mainstream semantic web app" two years ago . Founder Nova Spivak raised half as much money for Twine's parent company Radar Networks ($24m) as Berners-Lee's entire new institute is receiving. Twine faltered under poor usability and the leadership of Spivak, considered to be both one of the smartest people in the internet industry and a caustic egotist. Thus is the dilemma for this supposed next stage of the web. Andrew Orlowski tears into today's announcement in The Register , calling it "a confluence of two groups of people with a shared interest in bureaucracy." Orlowski says the Web of Data is a fraud as well: "Of course, most web data is personal communication that happens to have been recorded. Most of the rest is spam, generated by robots, or cut-and-paste material 'curated' by the unemployed or poor graduates - another form of spam, really." That's a funny critique but the truth is probably somewhere in between the superlatives and the condemnation. Critics like Orlowski have already grown jaded about the world-changing impact of the last iteration of the web (easy social publishing) and underestimate the platform potential of this next iteration. "I've always been sceptical of the need for a 'new discipline.' [Web Science]," says leading semantic web consultant Paul Miller . "A significant tranche of funding such as that announced by the Prime Minister this morning will be helpful in tackling some of the issues (both hard and soft) that still remain as we push more and more data out into the public sphere. I hope and expect that Nigel, Tim and others will devote at least as much attention to issues of trust, provenance, licensing etc as to the details of angle brackets, triples and ontologies." Miller did a podcast interview with Shadbolt for the UK's largest semantic web company Talis, here . For an in-depth explanation of Berners-Lee's perspective, see the two-part interview ReadWriteWeb founding Editor Richard MacManus did with him last year . MacManus has said that Berners-Lee's vision of a read/write, two-way web, was a key inspiration behind the founding of the publication you're reading now. We wish the Institute for Web Science the best of luck in delivering on its rich promise. Discuss
Opera Software, developers of web browser technology for PC, Mac, Linux and mobile, have just announced that their Opera "widgets" will now work on nearly any mobile phone. The widgets in question are small mini-applications that can run in Opera's web browser itself, on the desktop as standalone apps and now, as standalone apps on mobile phones, too. Built with standards like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, the widgets are easy for web developers to create since they don't require knowing a vendor-specific technology in order to do so. Sponsor According to the company's announcement, the new widgets take advantage of Opera's recently launched cross-platform UI framework, a framework that's intended to "help operators and manufacturers efficiently distribute a single browser UI across a wide range of devices." That change to browser distribution technology now applies to the Opera Widgets too. Already, there are hundreds of widgets available in Opera's online gallery , including everything from games to media players plus widgets for accessing Facebook, Twitter and more.
We’ve all had that awkward experience; you walk into a crowded party, and no one even acknowledges that you exist. This is the frustrating feeling that is plaguing lots of small business websites on the internet today. They’ve forgotten to make a plan for web site promotion until it’s too late, and now they can’t understand why their traffic is so low.
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So, you’ve come up with a great idea for an online business, and everyone that you’ve told about your idea thinks it will really be popular with internet audiences. Before you rush out to tell the world about what you’ve come up with, you’ve got to consider how you’ll use web site advertising to build a network of traffic for your business.
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Unlike the real world of brick and mortar businesses, where if you have more money, you can build a fancier store front and set your prices lower, the internet doesn’t show favorites to those that have more money to throw at web site advertising. However, it will reward you handsomely for using those tactics in an intelligent way.
The key to using web site advertising in the most efficient way is to build links with other websites that will help to direct traffic to your pages. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, because usually other sites are loath to give up real estate to help someone else out.
This is why it can be helpful to work with an experience internet marketing firm that will be able to plug you into their already existing network of commerce and information websites. This is a smart type of web site advertising because not only will you get valuable links, you’ll be able to target your exposure to the audience members that are most likely to make a purchase.
If you are aware of your need for web site advertising but still unclear about how having additional links to your business on other websites is going to help you to be more successful, you’ve got to think of the web like a highway and your site like one of millions of exits.
Every time you have a link to your site placed on another website, it’s like adding the number of exits that will take people to your pages. The more people that travel through your pages every day, the more chance you have to make as sale and hit the goals that will make you successful.
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