This week we're trying something new with the format of the Weekly Wrapup. Instead of listing all of the posts we published over the past week, we'll filter them so you just get the best posts. The idea is that this will make good weekend reading, because it'll be highlighting the best content of the week from Read/WriteWeb and our network blogs. Let us know if this format works for you.

Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.

Online Video Week

This week we focused on online video and here were our top posts:

Adobe Brings HD TV Quality to Web Video

This week Adobe launched a new version of their near ubiquitous Flash Player. Nicknamed "Moviestar", the new version of Flash Player 9 features HD Television quality. It includes H.264 standard video support – the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD high definition video players. Also added to the mix is High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio support and "hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced full screen video playback".

There were a lot of great comments on our post -- also if you're technically inclined I recommend you read Adobe engineer Tinic Uro's post detailing the nitty gritty.

Video Ads

Another big piece of online video news this week: Google launched YouTube Video Ads. Josh Catone asked whether AdSense for Video will be far behind? In related news, Adotube launched a Video Ad network.

Best Video Aggregators

For an in-depth look at video aggregation sites, check out Josh Catone's guide to finding the best videos. Video aggregation sites attempt to figure out the best videos each day from across the online videosphere. Also check out our picks for Top 10 Video Search Engines. Or if you just want to know what the most popular online videos are, this list of the Top 10 YouTube Videos of All Time is a good start!

Web Products

This week's Web Product of the Week is Should Do This, a new site from Robot Co-op that aggregates user submitted suggestions on any topic. Like other Robot Co-op sites, Should Do This is dead simple. Users enter suggestions into two text boxes in the form of "BLANK should BLANK," - e.g. "MySpace should release an API". Users can then agree or disagree with suggestions, vote on how likely they are to actually happen, vote on when they might happen, and leave comments or reasons why something should or shouldn't be done. The site has a similar look and feel to Robot Co-op's other products, such as 43 Things.

You can find many other startup profiles in our Startups category.

Analysis

Where is the Web Headed?

The Digestion Phase is a new term coined by Alex Iskold, to describe a period of time for us to reflect, to integrate, and to understand recent technologies and how they fit together. Alex noted that we are in one right now in relation to Web technologies. He says "it is the outcome of this phase that will decide if we continue to slide or if we rebound and start climbing back up. The deciding factor will be the true value of the technologies that we created."

Does the Internet Matter in Election Politics?

So asked Josh Catone, in a post that pondered what might it look like if web 2.0 picked the president? Judging by MySpace friends and YouTube channel views, America is preparing for a showdown of Barack Obama (Democrat) and Ron Paul (Republican). But all of the latest polling data concludes that neither Paul nor Obama are the presumptive nominees for their respective parties. So we shouldn't look at web popularity to predict election outcomes, even though the Internet is a powerful tool for politicians.

You can find more R/WW analysis posts here.

R/WW Network Blogs

Check out a wrap of the week's Digital Lifestyle news on last100. Here's their top story:

Leave your laptop behind with iPhone Web apps

Dan Langendorf writes"This past weekend I realized I do most of what I want on the Web with my iPhone. I don't mean editing web pages, updating blog posts, downloading photos and such, but for the basics of checking email, updating Facebook and Twitter accounts, sending instant messages, reading RSS feeds, making a list, taking a quick picture and emailing it to my flickr account, and listening to music or a book, I'm covered." He then goes on to outline some of his favorite iPhone social and productivity apps.

Alt Video Search Engines

Our other network blog AltSearchEngines focused on video search engines this week. It began Monday with the Top 10 Alternative Video Search Engines, followed on Wednesday with a Debate on Video Search with search engines Dabble and ClipBlast!. The week ended with an in-depth look at Search Engine of the Day Fooooo, a new Japanese video search engine.

Poll

Our poll this week asked: Where Do You Predominantly Watch or Download Online Video? Here are the results:

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YouTube 66% (233 votes)
News websites 1% (4 votes)
Cable or network TV sites 2% (7 votes)
Yahoo 3% (11 votes)
MySpace 0% (1 votes)
Google Video 5% (17 votes)
AOL Video 1% (2 votes)
MSN Video or Soapbox 0% (0 votes)
iTunes 3% (9 votes)
Metacafe 0% (0 votes)
Grouper 0% (1 votes)
StumbleVideo 1% (2 votes)
Digg 3% (9 votes)
Photobucket 0% (1 votes)
WebShots (CNET) 0% (0 votes)
iFilm 1% (2 votes)
DailyMotion 3% (10 votes)
Other (please comment) 13% (46 votes)

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So YouTube dominates the online video space - no surprises there, although I thought some of the newer startups might fare better with R/WW readers.

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.

News

The latter part of this week was dominated by the major outage suffered by popular VoIP product Skype.

Also this week eBay stepped up its attack on the online classifieds market in the US, by rolling its UK subsidiary Gumtree to three US cities - Boston, New York, and Chicago. Gumtree is the most popular classifieds site in England, and is popular in other European countries and Australia, serving 500,000 new ads every month. This move follows the launch into the US market last month of eBay's popular overseas classifieds service Kijiji. Note that eBay owns 25% of craigslist!

This week Google introduced embeddable maps and added Sun's Web Office suite StarOffice to Google Pack. In related news, there were rumors of a Web Office offering from Adobe. Google also partnered with Universal Music to sell DRM-free music. Speaking of Universal, they were a factor in the demise of online video site Bolt.com, which shut its website this week after settling a lawsuit with Universal in March. It's bit of a sad story, because online video copyright only became an issue after Google acquired YouTube. But it seems that Bolt.com didn't have deep enough pockets to survive.

Also this week Microsoft unveiled some updates to Windows Live Hotmail, which were at the same time an indication of how Windows Live is progressing. The answer? Slowly getting there, but still a lot of work to do.

Finally, some extra tidbits: Facebook is now offering RSS feeds and opened an iPhone version of their site, there was a sighting of Google Health screenshots, PubSub is back, and Yahoo Local got a makeover. You can follow all the latest Web Tech news on our new links blog, called (funnily enough) Web Tech News.

Read/WriteWeb Files

This week Read/WriteWeb featured a series of posts about Online Music. We started by identifying three main eras in online music so far:

1. P2P systems such as Napster and Kazaa;
2. iPod and iTunes;
3. Streaming music over the Internet, such as last.fm and Pandora.

We also ran a poll, asking what your favorite online music streaming service is. More on that at the end of the Wrapup. Our coverage this week:

• Update on the State of Internet Radio
• Top 5 Online Music Streaming Services: The Velvets Test
• The Filter Releases New Version of Music Recommendation Software
• FanCovers is YouTube For Amateur Music
• Amie Street: Low Cost, DRM-free Music Downloads
• Nugs.net: The Biggest Music Download Site You've Never Heard Of
• Top 10 Music Search Engines (AltSearchEngines)
• Live Concert Recordings on USB Sticks (last100)
• Ten web sites that offer free and legal music downloads (last100)
• Universal to sell DRM-free music with Google's help (last100)
• LimeWire enters DRM-free, digital music store fray (last100)

Web Products

This week's Web Product of the Week is BuiltWith.com, a Technology Profiler. Josh Catone reviewed it for R/WW and called it "an interesting site that reveals the behind the scenes technology that powers any web site." Unlike statistics websites such Popuri, said Josh, BuiltWith.com is not concerned with how many visits a page gets or its Google PageRank (though it does include very rudimentary statistics estimates from Compete). Instead, it peers under the hood to see what sort of technology is being used in the creation and delivery of the web site.

Other startups we profiled this week (apart from the online music ones noted above):

• ThinkFree Reaches 1 Million Hosted Documents
• Movable Type 4.0 Launched
• fav.or.it - New RSS Reader Aims to Integrate Commenting
• For Sale By Publisher Helps Site Owners Sell Their Own Ads
• iYomu, Social Network for Adults, Launches With $1 Million Prize
• PubMatic Aims to Maximize Revenue for Web Site Publishers
• Extending Microsoft Money - The Web Needs an Alternative to Paypal
• RedHerring Returns: New Website, Videos, Social Network

Analysis

This week Alex Iskold took a hard look at an issue that has been bothering many blogs and readers lately: How JavaScript is Slowing Down the Web (And What To Do About It). A single line of JavaScript is what powers a lot of blogging technologies these days, wrote Alex. Widgets, sharing tools, visitors tracking, advertisers. In many cases a single line of JavaScript is all that a blogger needs to add a new technology to their blog. The problem is what happens when a lot of these single lines of JavaScript come together. Check out the comments for some informative discussion on this vexing issue.

Other analysis posts this week:

• New Study Shows that Online Creativity and E-learning Popular with Kids
• Is the TV Channel Dead?
• Yahoo! Customers Most Satisfied, Ask Biggest Gainer
• Mobile Social Networking: MySpace, Facebook, MSN the Leading Services

R/WW Network Blogs

Our Digital Lifestyle blog last100 has a Weekly Wrapup too. In a great post titled ‘Microsoft Points - what???s next for the company???s virtual currency?‘, Mack D. Male examined Microsoft’s virtual currency strategy, which currently exists as part of Xbox Live Marketplace and the Zune Marketplace. But will that always be the case or could Microsoft have bigger things in mind for their points system? last100 also published a first look at YouTube Desktop, which aims to bring a desktop application experience to navigating and viewing YouTube videos through a web browser.

Over on AltSearchEngines, featured posts include a Great Debate on social search, more on music search engines (focusing on concerts and tickets), and plenty of reviews of Alt Search Engines.

Poll

Our poll this week asked: What is your favorite online music streaming service? Here are the results:

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last.fm 32% (239 votes)
Pandora 30% (222 votes)
Other (please comment) 10% (77 votes)
Yahoo Music 9% (67 votes)
iTunes Music Service 7% (55 votes)
Rhapsody 4% (27 votes)
FineTune 2% (16 votes)
Live365 2% (13 votes)
Napster (the latest version) 1% (8 votes)
AOL Music 1% (6 votes)
Slacker 1% (6 votes)
Zune Marketplace 1% (4 votes)
Mogg 1% (4 votes)
MSN Music 0% (1 votes)
iJigg 0% (0 votes)

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It was a very close race between last.fm and Pandora, but last.fm pipped their rival in the end. It's possible this had something to do with Pandora not currently being available outside the US, but then again in my own tests I concluded that last.fm was slightly better anyway.

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email. Also our sister site last100 has a Weekly Wrapup too.

R/WW Files: Personalizing Google

This week's feature series was on Google's efforts to implement personalization into their product range.

• Personalizing Google: Read/WriteWeb Files
• Interview with Google's Sep Kamvar, Lead Software Engineer for Personalization
• Personalized Search Primer - And Google's Approach
• How Effective is Google Personalized Search? 57% Say There's No Difference, or it's Worse!
• Privacy and Personalization: From Clickstream to Targeted Advertising
• iGoogle: The Epitome of Google Personalization
• A Look at Google's MyMaps
• New Google News Feature Feels "Web 1.0"
• Eric Schmidt Defines Web 3.0

Web Products

This week's Web Product of the Week is Animoto: Video Kills the Slideshow.

Also check out:

• Windows Live SkyDrive Launched - Enters a Crowded Online Storage Market
• Amazon Launches Lulu Competitor
• edgeio Launches Paid Content System
• microPledge: Funding Software Through Donations
• HBO Voyeur: Intriguing, Yet Creepy, Multimedia Video Project
• BlogTalkRadio: Anyone Can Be a Live Radio DJ
• Zlio Partners With eBay's Shopping.com in US
• LiveRail Video Ads - One Month Out
• Social Shopping Startup Kaboodle Acquired by Hearst - And It's Easy to See Why...
• Dabble Do Launches - Social To-Do List for Facebook
• Koonji: People-Powered Guides
• Firefox Launches Facebook App - a Social Network For Firefox Add-on Users
• Feedbuddy: RSS Matchmaking

Analysis

• Rethinking 'Crossing The Chasm'
• Who Will Be Your Web Office Provider?
• Online Ad Sales Growing, But Not At 'Premium' Sites
• Why Aren't Alt Search Engines Crawling Websites?
• IBM Report on "Media's Mean Streets"
• iPhone vs Mobile Web

Poll

Our poll this week asked: Has Personalization Improved Your Google Search Results? Here are the results:

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Yes, my search results have definitely improved 13% (34 votes)

Sometimes, but it's not a big change 17% (45 votes)

I haven't noticed any difference 45% (119 votes)

No, my search results have gotten worse 12% (31 votes)

I don't have a Google Account 6% (17 votes)

There is a difference, but it's not due to personalization (please comment) 0% (1 votes)

I don't use Google, or use it too rarely enough to notice 7% (19 votes)

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That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.

Product Reviews

This week's Web Product of the Week is Iceberg, which Phil Butler profiled for Read/WriteWeb. Iceberg is a private beta startup that provides a Web based platform for building, sharing and selling powerful business applications, without the need to do coding. Phil called it "potentially a powerful service for business and personal applications".

This week Alex Iskold wrote about Wine.com's new RSS-based API. Until recently, Alex wrote, Wine.com was just a basic wine catalog. It was well designed and easy to navigate, but it was definitely a web 1.0 kind of site. Not only did Wine.com open up its catalog, the company did it with elegance worthy of modern APIs like del.icio.us and Flickr. The API is implemented via RSS, where each query returns a feed.

Josh Catone checked out Operator11, a new entry into the growing field of live online video companies. It touts itself as an online television network that offers anyone the chance to host their own live television show. Where Operator11 differs from its competitors is that its software allows viewers to actually become guests on the show and participate in more than just text or voice chat.

Other startups we profiled this week

• Postful: Email Meets Snail Mail
• Tangler Launches Embedded Forums and Chat
• JayCut: Online Video Editing with Export
• Create Photo Books with Panraven
• Facebook App, Lending Club, Passes Half a Million Dollars in Loans
• Adjustables Debuts Video Ad Service at ad:tech Chicago
• rollSense: Your Blogroll on Steroids
• Newser: Human Edited News Aggregation

Read/WriteWeb Files

This week we introduced a new feature, the Read/WriteWeb Files. Every week we'll investigate a current issue or topic in Web technology. On Monday we opened a file on Yahoo entitled 100 Days For Yahoo. The title referred to a statement made by new Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang during an earnings conference call on Tuesday 17 July, in which he said that "the next 100 days or so" will be spent mapping out Yahoo’s strategic plan.

Josh Catone wrote a couple of excellent analysis posts about yahoo's future: How to Fix Yahoo!: Building a Yahoo! Platform and A Yahoo!-eBay Merger Makes Sense. The first article suggests that My Yahoo becomes an open platform. The second article makes the case for a combined Yahoo-eBay, which Josh thinks will be a viable threat to Google.

As for what assets Yahoo has now that it can build on, I wrote a post detailing the top 10 Yahoo! Properties. I also looked at how Yahoo's new advertising system is performing: Panama, 6 Months On.

Also check out Andy Pipe's comparison between Yahoo! Buzzlist and Google Trends.

Finally, this week we covered two new developments at Yahoo: Yahoo! Plans a Run at YouTube and New Yahoo! Search Features: Search Assist, Shortcuts.

Analysis

Here are the analysis posts we published this week:

• Towards the Attention Economy: Will Attention Silos Ever Open Up?
• Microsoft Works to be Offered as Free, Ad-Supported Desktop Suite - No Browser Version?
• Google Mashup Editor
• VCs: Startups Are Too Reliant on the M&A Market
• The Emerging Global Innovation Graph
• Social Networking Goes Global - Especially in North American Region
• IM Most Valuable Web 2.0 Tool for Enterprise

R/WW Network Blogs

Our Digital Lifestyle blog last100 looked at Amazon’s invasion into the living room. And in a post titled ‘Old technology creates meaningful connections‘, Josh Catone argued that some older technology — particularly physical media – has a more tangible connection with the user.

Over on AltSearchEngines, our network blog devoted to new search engines, the August Top 100 Alt Search Engine list was released. This week AltSearchEngines also published a 3 part series defining a) What is a Search Engine? (an article by Nitin Karandikar), b) What is Not a Search Engine? (by Kaila Colbin) and finally c) What is an Alternative Search Engine? (by ASE editor Charles Knight). The third article by Charles explains his motives behind the Top 100 List.

Poll

Our poll this week asked: Will Jerry Yang turn around Yahoo's fortunes in 100 days? Here are the results:

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Yes, Yang will sort Yahoo out and have them challenging Google and MS again 46% (111 votes)

It will stay much the same; Yang won't make that much difference 33% (81 votes)

No, Yahoo has failed to adapt - Yang can't stop the rot and Yahoo's decline will continue 21% (51 votes)

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Nearly half of respondants think that Jerry Yang will turn around the fortunes of the company he co-founded.

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.