b=14421' target='_blank'>

The investigation into GhostNet began after the office of the Dalai Lama suspected malware on its computers and contacted the Munk Center for International Studies to take a closer look. As the researchers dug deeper, they found more cause for concern: the operation, according to the researchers, appears to not only be spying on the Dalai Lama, but also on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.

While researchers believe the operation is based in China, they are quick to point out that this does not necessarily mean the Chinese government was involved. "This could well be the C.I.A. or the Russians. It's a murky realm that we're lifting the lid on," Ronald Deibert, an associate professor of political science at Munk told The New York Times.

The researchers' findings, Tracking GhostNet: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network, are due to be released this weekend on the Information Warfare Monitor Web site.
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Web Products
Still Shiny: 23 Apps We're Using One Month Later
Here at ReadWriteWeb we see hundreds of new apps, scripts, plug-ins and doo-das every week. We review some portion of those. Many we get excited about. But few stand the test of time for even 30 days. Here are 23 apps we're still using a month or more after discovering them.

We wrote a similar post last November ("30 Days Later: 22 Apps We're Still Using 1 Month After Finding Them") and can happily report that we're still loving almost all the services we wrote about then. If a service can make it past the 30 day mark, it has a good chance of sticking around for awhile. 22 or 23 in a month is a pretty impressive number really, so go web innovators go!

The Future of Firefox: Interview With Mozilla's Chief Innovation Officer
In my recent visit to Silicon Valley, I got the chance to visit the Mozilla headquarters. Among others at the organization, I spoke to Chris Beard - Mozilla's Chief Innovation Officer and the person overseeing its efforts to bring new concepts to the browser, a.k.a. Mozilla Labs. We discussed where Firefox is heading and how it compares to Google Chrome in particular. We also talked about Mozilla's new mobile browser Fennec, the add-on platform, and how recent innovations by Mozilla - such as Weave and Ubiquity - fit into the big picture. In this post we'll focus on the near future of Firefox.
Last.fm to Charge Subscription Fee for Many International Listeners
The CBS-acquired streaming music service Last.fm announced this week that it will "soon" require users outside of the US, UK and Germany to pay €3.00 per month to keep the music rolling. In blog comments on the announcement, the company explained that those three countries were the only ones where ad sales were proving successful enough to monetize the free music that way; elsewhere the money will have to come out of listeners' pockets. It's a dramatic move that could pave the way for other media companies to do the same and effectively open up international markets. People complain, but do you think that viewers would pay a similar monthly fee for international access to Hulu, for example? We do.

Facebook Tweaks New Homepages in Response to User Complaints
As we reported last week, Facebook's users clearly disliked the latest updates to their homepages, and now, Facebook is giving in to pressure from its most vocal users. According to Facebook, its users were especially unhappy with the lack of filtering mechanisms for the news stream on their homepages. This week Facebook's Chris Cox announced that the company plans to tweak the current design in order to give users greater control over what updates appear in the news stream.
The White House Has a Digg Clone
The White House has launched a new web site where anyone can submit and vote up their most important questions for President Obama about the economy. That's right - the White House has a Digg clone!




SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY
A Word from Our Sponsors
We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

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Jobwire

Former Yahoo! Now Guitar Hero Frontman
Activision Blizzard announced that it has appointed former Yahoo! COO Dan Rosensweig to be its new President and CEO of of RedOctane, the business unit which develops the mega-popular video game Guitar Hero. Rosensweig will be responsible for Guitar Hero's global operations "including game development, hardware manufacturing, supply chain, logistics and marketing" and report to President & CEO of Activision Publishing Mike Griffith.

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Web Trends

The Twitter Platform: 3 Years Old and Ready to Change the World
Twitter marked its 3rd birthday last weekend and the site that Nielsen called the fastest growing social network last month shows no signs of slowing down. While active participation by users is a great show of strength, the use of Twitter as a platform for developers and aggregate data analysis is the most exciting thing about the company. The story of Twitter as a platform is just beginning; the most exciting developments are still to come. In this post we share our three favorite examples of what Twitter is becoming; these 3rd party uses of the service point the way for the larger Twitter ecosystem to become even more important in the future. We're not talking about Twitter clients, we're talking about Twitter data mining.

How Do You Feel About "Ghost Twittering?"
The New York Times this week had an interesting article about the new trend of "ghost Twittering." If you don't know what that means, it's when someone, usually a celebrity, politician, or a "personal brand" of some sort, pays another person or other people to update their Twitter account on their behalf. This "ghost writer" of tweets thus becomes a "ghost Twitterer." While it may make sense for someone like U.S. President Barack Obama to farm out Twitter updates to staff (he has bigger tasks to focus on than tweets), when individual celebs and micro-celebs engage in this practice it seems a bit disingenuous. Is it really so hard to post 140 characters every now and then?
Gen Y Says: "I Want My Social TV!"
New research from Parks Associates found that many Gen Y TV viewers are ready for a change when it comes to their television-watching experience. According to a recent report, over one-fourth of users ages 18-24 are interested in having more social media features integrated into their TV. This data should come as good news to companies like Verizon and Yahoo!, both of whom have been pushing their new social networking widgets. But it also has broader implications that go beyond kids just wanting Facebook on their TV. The study found that there's a desire to use social networking as a platform to actually enhance the TV-watching experience through interactive chats with other viewers and to have the ability to recommend shows to friends.

Got an Hour? Create a Server in the Cloud
Dave Winer recently announced EC2 for Poets, a step-by-step guide to help you create a server on Amazon's EC2. "It's time to stop thinking about these servers as being things for geeks and start thinking about them as things for people with ideas," Winer said in a podcast roadmap he created for this work. The technology available today is enabling anyone with even the slightest technical bent to get out there and create amazing new things; often taking the technology in directions than the company which created it could have ever imagined.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY
Enterprise
Salesforce.com Integrates Twitter
When Gmail failed a few months ago, I tried using Google to find out what was going on. When that did not get me an answer, I tried Twitter and did find some answers. That alerted me to the power of real-time search in one specific usage case. It was a relatively minor problem for me. But what if I ran customer service for a SaaS firm that just had a major outage? How would I find and monitor the conversations going on out there? That is what this week's announcement by Salesforce.com about Twitter integration is all about.
Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.
SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL
That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
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ate classifieds fell 38%.
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Thanks to the U.S. housing boom, real estate classifieds had been one of the most stable sources of advertising income for newspapers, with growth rates up to 30% in 2006. But now, even recruitment advertising, another income source newspapers used to be able to count on, fell a full 42% in 2008 (and more than 50% in the last quarter of 2008), as overall recruitment fell to record lows thanks to the state of the economy, and as both recruiters and job seekers moved online to advertise and search for jobs.

Indeed, the state of the newspaper industry has become so dire that U.S. Senator Benjamin Cardin introduced a bill on Tuesday that would grant non-profit status (and the tax breaks that come with it) to ailing newspapers to give them a chance to restructure their business.


Image credit: Trulia blog

Shutting Down the Presses

In the last couple of weeks, a growing number of newspapers have moved their businesses completely online. Just last week, the Seattle P-I announced that it was going to become an online-only publication with a reduced staff (and the latest data shows that the traffic on the site has actually gone down since then).

Laying Off Journalists

The New York Times, after already selling its venerable headquarters in a lease-back deal earlier this month, now plans to cut 100 of its 1332 newsroom jobs, and the company just announced that it also plans to cut salaries by 5%. The Houston Chronicle just laid off 12% of its staff - and the list of papers that have ceased publication on the Newspaper Death Watch blog continues to grow.

The Breaking Point: Are We There Yet?

One thing is clear: a lot of newspaper are about to hit their breaking point. While there was already a trend towards online publications, the current economic climate is only accelerating this process. Gimmicky experiments like a custom newspaper that readers can print at home will do little to reverse this trend. Indeed, while some forms of printed newspapers (think free, fully advertising-financed newspapers distributed at train stations in Europe, for example) will most likely continue to be around for a while, the future of the industry is clearly online.

CC-licensed image used courtesy of Flickr user purdman1.
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ki/Decision_tree">decision trees in expert systems is nothing new, but applying that idea to a crowdsourcing model might possibly be a stroke of genius. Think Aardvark meets Wikipedia and you start to get the idea.
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Hunch is still in closed beta, but is accepting requests for invites. We're thinking you will want to sign up, though, after you hear what Caterina says about it:


Look. Decision-making is difficult, and decisions have to be made constantly. What should I be for Halloween? Do I need a Porsche? Does my hipster facial hair make me look stupid? Is Phoenix a good place to retire? Whom should I vote for? What toe ring should I buy?

It's dark and lonely work. Coin-flipping, I Ching consultation, closing your eyes and jumping, postponing the inevitable, Rock-Paper-Scissors, and asking your sister are all time-honored means of coming to a decision -- and yet we think there's room for one more: Hunch.


She adds that a lot of content in Hunch is going to be generated by its user base. Do you know the right questions to ask to help someone pick out the right pair of shoes for hiking, or what cell phone to buy? With Hunch, you will be able to get in on the ground floor and know that your contributions will help many people get the right answer to their question.



While we know very little about the inner workings of Hunch, it apparently combines decision trees with a fair amount of end user personalization in the form of questions it asks people visiting the site. These questions allow Hunch to form affinities with other users who ask similar questions. On the back end, contributors will be able to create topic areas (called Super Questions) and add questions and results underneath those topics. How much control you will have or how the interface looks for this we aren't sure yet.

Caterina also says that there is room for the site to make money, by including Super Question areas that are affiliated with commercial products or services, but that part is not being rushed as they want to get the core functionality working just right.

We think the potential for the idea behind Hunch is huge. If you look at another very famous crowdsourced project, Wikipedia, and combine that with the sheer utility of the application Aardvark (which lets you pose questions to an extensive network Aardvark-managed instant messaging contacts, our review here), the sky really is the limit for how much this tool can grow in usefulness and popularity.

Self-titled photo courtesy of Caterina Fake on Flickr.
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all the categories are combined, AOL was at the top with a 71% approval rating.
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For those of us who have moved on to using internet service providers (ISPs) that provide little more than basic internet access, AOL may conjure memories of free installer CDs in the mail and dialing in over a telephone line. Although AOL still offers dial-up accounts, they have been diligently growing their web destination offerings, including a full portal and news page, free email and two free instant messaging utilites, AIM and ICQ. Even with all these offerings they have succeeded in the tough job of making it simple for everyone who uses their service, either online or through their ISP, to have a great experience.

We will admit to clinging tenaciously to our free AIM account that we have had for many years. Even though we may access AIM through such various third-party interfaces as Gmail and Meebo (and even have a hard time thinking of those applications as third-party) we have long since stopped worrying about the service as anything but always there and available, like the air we breathe. However, somebody runs those servers with close to 100% uptime, and its worthwhile to reflect a moment and realize that AOL has made a commitment for the simple reason of maintaining their online reputation at a very high level.

Sure, we have all heard stories about AOL ISP customer service, and of course seen pictures of AOL CD art, but the numbers tell a different story - that AOL is committed to making sure people who choose them are pleased and have the best possible experience online.

Photo CD Reflections courtesy of Artnow314 on Flickr.
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e/FennecVision">Fennec, Mozilla's new mobile browser, comes in. In this post we look at Fennec's progress (it recently delivered its first beta) and Chris Beard gives us his thoughts on Fennec's strategy.

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From Prototype to Beta
We've been tracking the progress of Fennec since its first prototype in April 2008, to the launch of the pre-alpha version in February this year, and the recent launch of the first beta in mid-March. The first extension for Fennec also arrived on the scene in November 2008 - URL Fixer, an add-on that corrects typos in the address bar. The development of Fennec hasn't been without its problems - we reported on some glaring bugs soon after the pre-alpha launch. However the release of the beta this month shows that solid progress is being made.
How Fennec Aims to Get Users
Fennec aims to bring the Firefox browsing experience to the mobile phone, including the ecosystem of add-ons that are probably the biggest reason for using Firefox on the PC. However one immediate problem that Fennec is going to face is actually getting on mobile devices in the first place. For example Apple's Safari browser is the default browser on the iPhone and most users of the iPhone are more than happy with the default. So is Mozilla actively working to make Fennec a default browser on other devices? Beard said that, yes, Mozilla is looking for OEM deals with the likes of Nokia, Windows Mobile and Symbian. As of now, Fennec is only available on the Nokia N810.
However, even without those deals, Beard said that one big advantage of Fennec is that it's easy to install. He said that Fennec aims to bring the "the full Web" experience to the mobile platform, including Firefox's famed add-on platform. So Fennec isn't supposed to be a mini or micro version of the Web for mobile. Beard said that Mozilla is anticipating the increase in power of mobile devices, so they think the full web experience is within reach on mobile. For example, he mentioned getting the "Awesome bar" into mobile (the feature where you start to type in URLs in the browser bar and Firefox auto-completes them).
The User Experience
Although Fennec aims to duplicate much of Firefox's functionality, it has to do some things differently. For example instead of using your mouse to navigate, in Fennec you can have touchscreen interaction - or cursor keys for non-touchscreen handsets. For more on the UI, check out Fennec in action in this screencast by Madhava Enros, the lead user interface designer for Fennec:








Fennec is still in beta and only available on Nokia N810 right now, but there are other developments happening in Mozilla which lead us to believe that Fennec is being positioned as a key complement to Firefox. For example Mozilla's sync app Weave, which we will discuss more of in the next post in this series, now has an extension for Fennec that allows you to sync data from your desktop to Fennec. This ability to sync data between devices could ultimately prove to be a killer feature for Fennec.
The Competition
But despite its sync and add-ons, Fennec faces some stiff competition in the mobile web browser market. Other than Safari on the market-leading (for mobile web in the US at least) iPhone, Opera has consistently been an innovator on mobile phones and it was one of our top 10 Mobile Web products of 2008. Opera's mobile browser is already being shipped on millions of handsets from major mobile manufacturers including HTC, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, T-Mobile, and more. Opera is also available for different types of mobile operating systems like Symbian, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, and Linux, making it the alternative browser of choice for many handset owners.
We also rather like Skyfire, a relatively new entrant to the mobile browser market which has already gained many fans. Let's not forget too that Google's Chrome will come to mobile - we reported last September that a mobile version of Chrome for Android was on the books even at that early stage.
So it's going to be very tough for Fennec, even with the reputation and functionality of Firefox behind it, to make headway in this competitive market. Now let us know in the comments which mobile browser you currently use - and why.

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sourcingexamples.pbwiki.com/">135 real-world examples of businesses leveraging crowd contributions online. From small projects like the collaborative advertising creation project FatMuffin to big company efforts like SAP's Ecosystem, this list is great for inspiration and context.

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The web is proving to be quite disruptive of all kinds of old approaches to doing business, but there's still a shortage of case studies when it comes to new paradigms like crowdsourcing. Ramachandran's list doesn't include any evaluation of the various programs' effectiveness yet, but it's a great place to start. The big list is separated into four parts and each is sortable by project, sector and country of origin. If you'd like to search inside the project and company websites for all 135 examples, we've pulled those links into this custom search engine.

The Crowdsourcing List is itself a crowdsourced effort. It's a wiki, so other people can sign up to contribute more examples, it's been spread around Twitter through retweets and hit the most popular page of social bookmarking site Delicious without having had any media or blog coverage yet as far as we can see.

Lists like this are a great way to add value to conversations on the web and they help technology changes feel all the more tangible. It brings to mind the new Creative Commons database of case studies. Crowdsourcing in particular is something that we've written about extensively here on ReadWriteWeb.

Thanks, Anjali, for putting together this list!



Photo above CC from Flickr user Chris Hambly.
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.org/ck.php?n=14363&cb=14363' target='_blank'>

There are several key differences that TextFlow has from its primary competitors such as EtherPad and Google Docs:


TextFlow is still an AIR application. If you were a TextFlow user before, nothing critical has changed in this regard. Most of TextFlow's competitors are online-only.

Although you can invite people to edit a document online, they basically get their own view of the document. Once they are finished editing, they would click share to push those changes back to the master document. In other words, this isn't live collaboration.

Collaborators that you send an email invite to will be able to work on a web-based version of TextFlow that just supports editing the current document.




Going back through the TextFlow blog, it appears that they have addressed our initial complaint of only being able to successfully edit limited document length files, as well as a number of Microsoft Word document compatibility fixes among other changes.

Overall, we think TextFlow is moving in the right direction, and sticking with a workflow idea that works really well with certain people's method of collaborating on documents. TextFlow comes in a business edition at $99 per user/year and a free personal edition.
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penx.org/ck.php?n=14350&cb=14350' target='_blank'>



Wozniak Joins DeepDyve

According to Wozniak, most of the information on the web is "collecting dust because nobody's come up with a way to mine the data in a way that's useful to researchers and consumers." He believes that DeepDyve has the potential to transform Deep Web search and says he's "excited to bring about that transformation."

Wozniak's role at DeepDyve isn't limiting in any way, but the company expects that his contributions will focus on the DeepDvye technology, especially as it relates to the user experience. As a member of the Advisory Board, he will also meet formally with the company twice per year.

DeepDyve is Not Google

DeepDyve is currently known for their KeyPhrase technology which lets you type in anything in their search box from a few words to entire paragraphs that you copy and paste.  The search engine's algorithm itself was developed by two scientists who worked on the Human Genome Project.  As with that project which required using pattern-matching techniques across large amounts of data, there's also a need for search engines that can analyze large amounts of data in the same way. That's precisely what DeepDyve does.

Typically, keyword search on other engines breaks down as queries grow in length - but not on DeepDyve. The more search terms you enter, the more relevant your results. The DeepDyve engine actually encourages longer search queries. This type of search technique certainly comes at a good time, as our query length is growing each year, with 8-plus keyword searches having increased 20% year-over-year as of February, 2009.

Progress and Problems

We looked at DeepDyve back in September when it was still behind a paywall, then reviewed it again in November when they introduced a free version. At the time, we noted that there were still some issues with any "deep web" search engine - most notably that a lot of the information which DeepDyve uncovers is still behind additional paywalls on subscription-based web sites. Today, that issue still remains.

However, the complaints of many of the commenters on the last post were not about the paywalls but about how the site forced you to register before you could do any searches. As one anonymous commenter noted, to paraphrase, "if you're going to launch a search engine, open it up so people can use it."

It seems DeepDyve took that advice. The search box on the homepage is immediately accessible and even the results pages have a more refined look today than they did only a few months prior.



These sorts of complaints highlight the problem with reviewing cutting edge technologies when they're still in such a raw format - people go there expecting Google, find what appears to be a boring research experiment and then become disillusioned. What they fail to see - what they cannot see, in fact - is that a cursory glance can't reveal the technology behind the site or service. The technology in DeepDyve, for instance, involves advanced algorithms that other engines don't even have yet. The usability issues will be addressed in time and the issues with access to content behind paywalls could always eventually be worked out through partnership deals. But that business side of the DeepDyve project isn't anywhere near as interesting as the potential of gaining access to 99.8% more of the Internet!
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that it collects from the advertiser's website. The company claims that this technology improves click-thru rates, conversion rates and average order size.

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In a briefing, the company showed us how its recommendations are influencing ads on AT&T's website, based on what an individual user browses at Overstock.

There would obviously be an affinity with Overstock already for the user, if they had visited Overstock (or similar sites also using ChoiceStream's platform) before and then saw an ad for Overstock on AT&T. Nevertheless, despite this bias it makes sense that conversions would increase if the Overstock ad that a user sees on AT&T's website is personalized based on that user's past shopping or browsing behavior. The company claimed that for this particular campaign, user click-thru rates doubled, conversion "about doubled" and Overstock orders increased by an average of 20-30%. If accurate, then those are compelling figures for Overstock.
It remains to be seen whether this technology can be used generally. Right now it appears to have a relatively limited niche in the retail market and its success is very dependent on users having visited and used participating sites (such as Overstock) before.

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