Still “hooked” after all these months, Mike Wendland (Detroit Free Press) remains smitten with his iPhone. “Every week, I’ve been getting the latest and greatest of the mobile phones being introduced for holiday sales. And while some are promising, none can come close to the iPhone in ease, elegance and excellence of design. Almost five months now since it was introduced in the United States, it remains not just the best cell phone I’ve ever used but the most revolutionary piece of personal technology I’ve ever used.”

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

Note: If you would like to sponsor the Weekly Wrapup - which gives you a banner ad in our feeds as well as on site - please contact the editor for pricing details.

Web News

OpenSocial, Facebook Ad Network, MySpace HyperTargeting

Last week was all about Google's OpenSocial, a project that will tie together Google, MySpace and other social networking platforms in a common widget development environment. This week the discussion raged on. By the end of the week it had boiled down to two themes:

1) OpenSocial isn't quite as "open" as it makes out to be - check out Marshall Kirkpatrick's post for more. Also see Bernard Lunn's post on the privacy implications of OpenSocial. In summary, OpenSocial seems to be less about open standards, and more about Google setting the standards. Nevertheless, it also has a lot of things going for it - see Sean Ammirati's post Google's Kevin Marks Discusses OpenSocial at Defrag to find out Google's plans for OpenSocial.

2) Facebook isn't in a rush to join OpenSocial; indeed this week they focused primarily on pushing out their new advertising network. See Josh Catone's coverage of Facebook's ad plans. Also Josh wrote about why Facebook shouldn't fear OpenSocial.

On the advertising front, there was action from MySpace this week too. The world's largest social networking site announced that it would be launching a new advertising program called "HyperTargeting," which uses profile data to target ads to users.

This week we ran a poll asking: Will Facebook Join OpenSocial? See a summary of the comments here. The results at press time:

Yes 44%
No 46%
Open What? 10%

No GPhone, but Google Announces Android

The other big Web news of the week: after months if not years of speculation, Google announced that they are not in fact developing a single phone, but rather an ostensibly open-source mobile operating system called Android.

Other Web tech news this week:

• IAC to Split Up, Announces Major Ad Deal with Google
• Major Newspapers Consider Ad Alliance
• MySpace Voted Most Likely to Be Blocked at Work
• Sumner Redstone: YouTube Won't Pay The Rent
• YouTube Releases Multi-file Uploader, Raises File Limits to 1 GB

Web Products

Blogcosm Challenges Technorati, Techmeme to Parse the Blogosphere

Blogcosm is a new company aiming to build a directory of the blogosphere. From the mundane to the esoteric, the company wants to provide users with a rich data set about any particular blog of interest or the vertical market it is in. Marshall Kirkpatrick met founder Scott Lawton, an old time geek from Massachusetts, this week at the first annual Blog World Expo in Las Vegas. Blogcosm built a blog directory of all the speakers at Blog World Expo and the blogs they write for, as a case study.

Check our post for more, but note that the current Blogcosm site is very basic and doesn't have any of the sophisticated features the founder talked up in the post.

Where the Cool Photos Hang Out

Remember when Flickr used to be the elite hang out of the visual digerati? By initially embracing talented photographers, Flickr developed a reputation as the place to go to check out amazing amateur and professional photography on the web. But then Yahoo! came along and encouraged users of its Photos service to migrate to Flickr, opening the site up to anyone and their vacation pictures. Has Flickr become boring and mundane? Where should we turn to now to find all the cool photos?

Flickr is still a great photo hosting platform used by a large number of amazing photographers, but cutting through the increased noise can be a chore. The six sites in this post will help you locate the more artistic photos out there on the web, without having to wade through any photos of Aunt Millie at the beach.

TrueKnowledge Demos Its Semantic Search Engine

Venture funded UK semantic search engine TrueKnowledge unveiled a demo of its private beta this week - and Read/WriteWeb was one of the first to publish a review. TrueKnowledge looks like an interesting site to watch. One cannot help but think of the still-unlaunched Powerset, but it's also reminiscent of the very real Ask.com "smart answers".

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

Analysis

How a Startup Inspired HP's Print 2.0 Strategy

Big computing company HP was promoting a strange concept at the Web 2.0 Summit in October: Print 2.0. At first R/WW editor Richard MacManus couldn't figure out what this meant. Web-based printers? Some new form of inkless paper? Curious to know more, while he was at the Summit Richard met up with HP's Antonio Rodriguez - formerly of startup Tabblo, now Director of Research and Development for HP???s embedded web-to-print group.

The Social Enterprise - What Works, and What Doesn't

Alex Iskold asks why should enterprises go social, and what are the compelling reasons for adoption? On the surface there are immediate benefits, but from experience we know that consumer technologies do not directly map into the enterprise. In this post, Alex explored the reasons for the social enterprise, looking at what social technologies fit and raising various concerns related to adoption.

E-Government Meets Web 2.0: Goodbye Portals, Hello Web Services

Gartner recently released a couple of reports on how web 2.0 technologies are being used in e-Government. The reports are entitled The E-Government Hype Cycle Meets Web 2.0 and Government and Web 2.0: The Emerging Midoffice. Both are about how modern e-government efforts are moving away from the 'one stop shop' portal approach that characterized early efforts, and are turning more towards mashups and (to quote the first Gartner report) "a number of mostly adventurous initiatives with blogs, wikis or islands in Second Life." But it's the ecosystem of Web Services - and the reusability of content and services that Web Services enable - that really excites Gartner about web 2.0 in e-government.

You can find more R/WW analysis posts here.

Events

This week the Defrag conference was held - and it got some rave reviews. For an overview of the conference, check out Sean Ammirati's post: Five Themes From the Defrag Conference. See also Charles Knight's live-blogging of the event on AltSearchEngines.

R/WW Network Blogs

last100

Our Digital Lifestyle blog last100 this week looked at the new NPR website. Daniel Langendorf wrote that "I’m in music heaven again. The new site uses a slick Flash pop-up player that’s super-easy to use and, as an added bonus, works across all NPR properties."

Alt Search Engines

This week AltSearchEngines was busy live-blogging Defrag. But also there's a feature post about people search engine Wink, which this week released advanced profile controls, giving people complete control over the contents of the search result for their name.

Read/WriteTalk

Sean Ammirati of Read/WriteTalk interviewed Kaliya Hamlin - a.k.a. Identity Woman. She's recognized as one of the thought leaders in user centric identity, having helped organize Identity Commons and lead the Internet Identity Workshop.

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

“With Logic Studio,” reports Peter Kirn (Macworld), “Apple has transformed Logic from a deep but difficult program into one of the most streamlined and elegant music environments of its kind.” Kirn gives Logic Studio a 4.5-mouse rating (out of five), concluding that its “ streamlined, fewer clicks-to-music philosophy throughout, combined with more precise tools for audio editing and surround, make this a landmark release.”

At the University of Cincinnati’s Conservatory of Music, “electronic media” majors use MacBook Pro computers and the iLife suite of digital authoring tools to hone the skills they need for careers in audio and video production, radio, broadcast journalism, and new media. “The MacBook Pro allows us to leverage the iLife software suite,” explains Assistant Professor Richard Cawood. “This gives students an entire tapestry of tools for video, audio, web, and photographic work.”

Go to a concert, and you’re likely to see a tightly choreographed program on stage and an even more elaborately choreographed multimedia extravaganza playing out on the huge, multi-million-pixel displays backing up the on-stage performance by your favorite artists. Like the dazzling video shows created by XL Video. Specialists in huge-format video, XL Video uses “Macs throughout the whole process, from concept drawings to content creation to final playback. And Final Cut is the linking piece of the chain,” says Richard Burford, head of XL Video.

Wednesday was the kickoff meeting of the Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency, of which I am a member. The commissionhas thirty-four members and has four co-chairs: Congressmen Jim Langevin and Michael McCaul, Admiral Bobby Inman, and Scott Charney. It was organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a national security think tank in Washington. Our goal is to provide advice about cyber-security policy to the next presidential administration. Eventually we’ll produce a report with our findings and recommendations.

I won’t presume to speak for my fellow members, and it’s way too early to predict the contents of our final report. But the meeting got me thinking about what government can do to improve cyber-security. I’ll offer a few thoughts here.

One of the biggest challenges comes from the broad and porous border between government systems and private systems. Not only are government computers networked pervasively to privately-owner computers; but government relies heavily on off-the-shelf technologies whose characteristics are shaped by the market choices of private parties. While it’s important to better protect the more isolated, high-security government systems, real progress elsewhere will depend on ordinary technologies getting more secure.

Ordinary technologies are designed by the market, and the market is big and very hard to budge. I’ve written before about the market failures that cause security to be under-provided. The market, subject to these failures, controls what happens in private systems, and in practice also in ordinary government systems.

To put it another way, although our national cybersecurity strategy might be announced in Washington, our national cybersecurity practice will be defined in the average Silicon Valley cubicle. It’s hard to see what government can do to affect what happens in that cubicle. Indeed, I’d judge our policy as a success if we have any positive impact, no matter how small, in the cubicle.

I see three basic strategies for doing this. First, government can be a cheerleader, exhorting people to improve security, convening meetings to discuss and publicize best practices, and so on. This is cheap and easy, won’t do any harm, and might help a bit at the margin. Second, government can use its purchasing power. In practice this means deliberately overpaying for security, to boost demand for higher-security products. This might be expensive, and its effects will be limited because the majority of buyers will still be happy to pay less for less secure systems. Third, government can invest in human capital, trying to improve education in computer technology generally and computer security specifically, and supporting programs that train researchers and practitioners. This last strategy is slow but I’m convinced it can be effective.

I’m looking forward to working through these problems with my fellow commission members. And I’m eager to hear what you all think.

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“That tall mocha Frappuccino never sounded so good,” comments Ellen Lee (San Francisco Chronicle) as she downs her mocha while testing out the iTunes WiFi Music Store at a San Francisco Starbucks. “The new service lets customers shop for music wirelessly through iTunes at Starbucks for free,” Lee explains. It made its debut in New York and Seattle Starbucks coffee shops earlier this year, just opened all across the San Francisco Bay area this week, and “is expected to be available in the nation’s 6,000 company-operated Starbucks coffee shops by the end of 2009.”

If you’ve visited the Aperture Users Professional Network recently, you no doubt noticed that the site sports a great new design that makes finding content on Aperture—like this informative article by Brett Wilhelm—much easier. Aperture gave Wilhelm, a photojournalist by trade, all the tools he needed to successfully shoot a friend’s wedding, edit the shoot, design a book (an elaborate 80-page layout), and have it delivered just seven days later—the day the bride and groom returned from their honeymoon. “I’m pleased to say,” Wilhelm says of the book, that “it was in its 2nd printing in under two weeks. Thank you Aperture.”

Recently I took part in a Technology Liberation Front podcast about the Comcast controversy, with Adam Thierer, Jerry Brito, Richard Bennett, and James L. Gattuso. There’s now a (slightly edited) transcript online.

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Farhad Manjoo (Salon) makes a compelling case. “If we’re going just by what’s better—the ages-old Mac-vs.-PC debate is over. Long over. Yell it from the rooftops; The Mac has won.” Now’s the right time “to buy an Apple computer,” proclaims Manjoo. “Indeed, it’s been that time for the past five years.” After all, “its Macintosh business is now in league with that of the biggest PC companies in the world.” And “everyone who’s used it agrees that Leopard, the operating system that Apple released late last month, is to its chief rival, Microsoft’s Windows Vista, roughly as Richard Wagner is to Richard Marx.” Manjoo even takes the opportunity to “put to rest the myth that an Apple computer will set you back more than a Windows PC. In fact,” he says, “it’ll cost you less.”