Survey results released by We Media/Zogby earlier this week show that more people turn to the internet for news than any other source.

The survey found that nearly half of all people in the United States (48%) cite the internet as their primary source of news and information, compared to 29% for television, 11% for radio, and a dismal 10% for newspapers. There was an age difference at the lower end, with only 7% of people aged 18-29 getting news from newspapers, vs 17% of those 65 and older.

67% of Americans believe traditional journalism is out of touch with what they want from their news.

It should be noted that the survey did not break down the types of news sites respondents were reading online, so by no means do the results equate with the death of the mainstream media (ie they could well be reading mainstream media sites online). The figures do suggest that some forms of offline news reporting may well be headed to the Deadpool over the next 5-10 years, at least in the United States. It will be a long and slow death, but as newspapers and radio slump into lower and lower single figures, it’s a given that the presence of both will shrink; we’re already seeing massive across the board downsizing now in print media.

(in part via Reuters, image credit: Brian Solis)

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Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. Highlights include analysis of Adobe AIR and its apps, recommendation engines, Google Sites, the 'free' theory of the Web, Twitter vs mainstream media, Etsy vs eBay, and much more. Don't forget to click through to our website and leave a comment on our posts, for a chance to win a daily $30 Amazon gift voucher. We're giving one voucher away every day for a month!

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.

Web Trends

How Microsoft Can Beat Google on the Web: Take User Data to the Bank by Marshall Kirkpatrick

The times are changing, Microsoft is losing and Google has won as computing moves to the web - right? That's not necessarily the case. In fact, Microsoft has a clear opportunity to come from behind online and dominate the future, albeit in a radically different way than they dominated the past.

Look to the bank, as metaphor, for one vision of how it could go down. Microsoft could beat Google by embracing services the same way Google has but simultaneously building a strong bond of trust with users around protection and proper use of user data. Like a bank, for user data. I'd call this an emerging theory that not only I hold - what do you think?

Earthquake in UK? News Broken on Twitter by Josh Catone

It would appear that an earthquake was just felt across the UK (hopefully not a major one!). Where did the news first break? Well, we heard about it over Twitter. It's all over the site, including being broken on Twitter-based news organization BreakingNewsOn, which is reporting a 5.3 magnitude earthquake in the UK with minimal damage reported so far. Where didn't we hear about the quake? The mainstream press.

Google Sites the Next Sharepoint? Maybe Not....Why Google Apps Could Lose the Enterprise Market by Sarah Perez

This week Google announced Google Sites, a wiki product built from JotSpot. The blogosphere is already comparing the product to Sharepoint and trying to drive nails into Microsoft's coffin. Sarah argues that it's far too soon to claim that Google is offering anything that really has a shot at making a dent in the enterprise world.

Related: Technology Populism: Risks & Rewards
Social Tools Go to Work...Facebook, MySpace, Netvibes, iGoogle, and More in the Enterprise

Rethinking Recommendation Engines by Alex Iskold

Over two years ago, Netflix announced a Recommendation Engine contest - anyone who invents an algorithm that does 10% better than their current recommendation system will win $1 Million dollars. Many research teams raced to attack the problem, excited by the unprecedented amount of data available. Initially quite a lot of progress was made, but then slowly the progress stalled and now teams are stuck at around the 8.5% improvement mark.

Related: 10 Recommended Recommendation Engines

Beware of Freeconomics by Alex Iskold

A few weeks ago we published a piece on this blog entitled The Danger of Free, in which we discussed the rise of free - a marketing strategy where digital products are given away. This month's issue of Wired magazine features a cover story on the topic by editor-in-chief Chris Anderson. The article is a preview of his forthcoming book, called (you guessed it) Free. However in this post we look at two issues that make this new economic model rather worrisome: monopolistic markets and complex transactions.

Social News: Can the Digg/Mixx/Buzz Model Hold Up Against FriendFeed and Sphinn? by Marshall Kirkpatrick

The social news space is developing at a mind-boggling pace. There are two ends of a spectrum emerging - Digg,Mixx and Buzz are offering general interest social news about a variety of topics and fueled by large groups of users, whereas services like FriendFeed, the social media marketing site Sphinnn and sites like the Twitter-sliver Pulse of Open Source offer news from a targeted group of users and/or on very specific topics.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

Web Products

6 Adobe AIR Apps to Check Out by Sarah Perez

This week Adobe launched out of Labs the Adobe Integrated Runtime, or AIR. AIR is a really exciting platform that combines qualities of the web with a presence on the desktop by making it easy to build attractive Internet connected applications that live outside the browser. Now that AIR has dropped the beta tag (see our previous coverage), it's time to look at some of the AIR apps you can use today. Did your favorite app make the list?

Related: The Best Things About Adobe's AIR Platform by Marshall Kirkpatrick

10 Recommended Recommendation Engines by Richard MacManus

As a complementary post to Alex Iskold's analysis Rethinking Recommendation Engines, we presented 10 recommendation engines that we like. And we didn't include the obvious ones, such as Amazon, Netflix, last.fm, Pandora. So it's not a 'top 10', don't panic! We invite you to add your favorites in the comments.

Web-to-TV Show 'Quarterlife' Bombs in NBC Debut - Or Did It? by Josh Catone

Last November we reported that the web-based scripted drama "Quarterlife" was making the unlikely jump to primetime television. Last night, Quarterlife debuted on NBC in the 10pm time slot, and the results were disappointing by television standards. The web-turned-TV show pulled a 1.6 share among 18-34 year olds, and averaged just under 3.9 million viewers for the time slot, good enough for third place. Interestingly, one of the shows it trailed was the CBS drama "Jericho," which was rescued from cancellation due to a massive grassroots web campaign to save it.

Distributed Mass Customization: Is Etsy the Next eBay? by Bernard Lunn

A lot of people scratched their heads when Etsy raised $27 million. What on earth? Handmade goods, that's about as low tech as you can get!

Then Umair Haque, a well respected blogger and strategist - albeit one who is known for being a bit “out there” - asked Is Etsy the next Google? Maybe Umair was just saying that this is big. One of his commenters pointed out: “not Google, but maybe the next eBay”. That makes sense. When eBay came out, the first reaction was “huh, Pez Dispensers and junk from garage/attic?”. eBay was an online garage sale and Etsy is an online street fair.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Digital Lifestyle News at last100

This week on last100 there was a hands-on review of Nokia's latest Internet Tablet, the N810. Last100 editor Steve O'Hear wrote: "The first thing to notice about the N810 - beyond its good looks and very solid feeling build - is how Nokia is pitching the device. Despite its relatively high price and Linux foundations, the N810 is being pitched as a consumer-friendly device for those who want to stay connected to the social Web."

Next up, in a post titled From "Alfred Hitchcock" to the "A-Team", where to find classic TV on the Web', Daniel Langendorf examines recent efforts by the U.S. television networks to offer up their classic content on the Web.

In other digital lifestyle news, iTunes has overtaken Best Buy to become No.2 music retailer in U.S., and DivX has shut down its online video service Stage6.

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

A rumor peddled by Peter Kafka of Silicon Alley Insider in a article sent to press Friday morning, concerning IAC’s alleged consideration of the replacement of Ask’s search engine technology, Teoma, with the vastly more popular system employed by Google, has effectively been debunked. Reuters has now reported that source “familiar with the matter” has declared any such purported murmurs as “incorrect.”

Ask is in a rather odd situation at the moment. While its share of the search market has grown somewhat in the last few months, a likely result of the hard-charging advertising efforts it has unleashed as of late, its parent company, IAC, is traversing quite the rough patch. Great trouble could brew over IAC’s very public dispute with Liberty Media, its present controlling shareholder, which Michele Gershberg of Reuters, in relaying word delivered by various analysts, has said will be headed to a contentious trial next month. Such a clash could make for an unsavory distraction for IAC as it takes on the task of furthering the painstaking growth of Ask, following many quarters of relatively unsubstantial increases. Already IAC has employed a very large financial investment leveraged to push Ask into a greater gain-making trajectory, and though numbers are on the ascent, it’s arguable that the returns may not be viewed as worthwhile as many had hoped or foreseen.

The speculation of Ask’s retirement of Teoma is said to be partly responsible for IAC’s stock to fall 7 percent Friday. IAC left the evening markets Friday at $19.90.

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YouTube for dance videos DanceJam has launched into open beta today after several months of private testing.

DanceJam offers dance battles where users dance off against each other, with viewers voting on the best video. DanceJam also offers general dance videos, including locally uploaded content and videos from external sites such YouTube.

DanceJam was founded by M.C. Hammer, and Geoffrey Arone and Anthony Young from Flock. The company has taken $4.5 million in funding over two rounds, with investors including Ron Conway, Alex Algard, Michael Tanne, Geoff Ralston, Alex Welch, Ariel Poler, Rustic Canyon Partners, Softbank Capital and Michael Arrington.

You can see an example of a “Dance Jam” here.

Disclosure: Michael (as noted in the post) is an investor, I’m not.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Ok, it’s a bit ridiculous that social networks for every conceivable market demographic exist. But I’m guessing, based on the success of Maya’s Mom (acquired in August 2007 by BabyCenter) and other social sites around parenting, that New York based Totspot could find a profitable niche.

The service, which is built on Ruby on Rails, just entered private beta. They are targeting new mothers who will create profiles for themselves and their babies, and add other mothers/kids as friends. A key part of the service will be recording milestones like the first crawl, steps, solid food, word said, etc. with text, video and photos. Users will then be able to have books printed with all of this material, for an additional fee.

Profile pages for members will not be available to the public. Users can either open them up to all Totspot members, or just their friends.

The company says they have not yet raised any capital but are currently talking to venture capitalists in New York and Silicon Valley. Sign up on their home page to request a beta invitation.

And if you have a baby, let me know if you think you’d use this.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

In our post 35 Ways to Stream Your Life, Josh Catone listed 35 apps that aggregate all the little bits of your online life. Commenter matthewvb sees some irony in the current craze for lifestreaming, pointing out that "a little over a year ago (Sept 06) when Facebook launched their news feed feature [...] it was met with huge resistance from the Facebook community." Yet now, aggregating details of what you're doing online has become a natural online activity. Good point, so congratulations Matthew, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher - courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget. Here's his full comment:

"I find it really interesting that a little over a year ago (Sept 06) when Facebook launched their news feed feature that it was met with huge resistance from the Facebook community. There were groups started and claims that users were going to leave -- all because they didn't want their personal information broadcasted like the news feed does.

Now we have dozens upon dozens of websites that do just that; and the global web community has not only endorsed them but pushed them forward to be "the" sites to be on. Especially as more and more people join different social networks, the need for these aggregating/life-streaming apps has become a necessity as opposed to an invasion of privacy."

Filed under: Networking

So IBM is apparently working like crazy on some next-gen communications technology that -- ready to have your mind blown? -- "uses light instead of wires to send information." We know, this is some crazy future crap up in here, but check it out. Apparently this so-called light-based communications system is supposed to be ten times more power efficient than others in its class, and can transfer data at speeds far greater than our current 4Mbps token-ring networks and even the next-gen 10BASE2 Ethernet (as if!); if optical data communications are actually real, well, it's just in time because we've been seriously maxing out our Tandy 1000 playing MUDs. Touting such other gibberish as "high definition content," and "ex-aflop supercomputing," IBM's Optocards (which feature integrated "Optochips") can apparently move data at up to 8Tbps / 1TBps per second, which isn't quite up to snuff to compete with Alcatel-Lucent's latest, but is still, like, way more than necessary for accessing the Engadget BBS.

 

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What it does

Big Brother getting you down? The internet can be a cold, cruel world especially if you’ve got a couple of compromising photos you’d rather not have seen the light of day show up Johnny Doe’s Facebook page. For the less than tech savvy, controlling internet identity can seem like a difficult, if not impossible task. Who controls Google, anyways? With RealMee, you can take your internet identity into your own hands. Really. RealMee lets you create a personal website within 1 minute. You create what you want to be seen about you. Don’t let others create your image. Do it yourself. The website you create is guaranteed by RealMee to come up in top ranking results in all the major search engines.

In their own words

“RealMee is a service with which you can make a personal website in just a matter of seconds. The website can be found by people who look for you in search engines. Actually, the link will be among the top search results.





We play by the rules set by search engines. This means no 'cloaking', 'linkfarming' and all those other geeky terms that describe ways to game the search engines.





We designed the service with the vision that it should be really easy for anyone to make this website and thereby establishing control over their online identity. For the near future we have a lot of ideas for new features that are about one thing only: your public identity.”

Why it might be a killer

RealMee is a great way to help control your online identity especially if there is information about you out there on the Web that doesn't paint the picture you want other people to see. It’s a big help for those who don’t know a lot about the nets and getting your page to the top.

Some questions

Does RealMee really work in identity control? Will user be satisfied with the results they find? How does RealMee ensure its users are top ranked?

Updates


 » original news

Filed under: Portable Audio

The XM / Sirius merger soap opera never ends, does it? Although the original deal allowed for either company to walk away risk free on March 1 if government regulators didn't approve, the two companies have looked each other deeply in the eye and re-affirmed their love for each other -- for another two months. That's right, they've only extended the deadline for a whopping eight more weeks -- it's like no one at either company has noticed that this no part of this process has actually been on schedule or gone smoothly. Seriously, if we thought we could put a merger on deathwatch, we might actually do that here. Ah well, here's to young love -- too bad most of those stories end up with everyone dead, eh?

 

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