Toluu

ReadWriteWeb - AideRSS (Great)

Bit.ly Plug-in Extends Tiny URLs, Shows Clickthrough NumbersToday

Our favorite URL shortening service, Bit.ly, has just released a Firefox plug-in that you'll probably want to add to your browser. It lets users hover over shortened URLs from a wide variety of services, including TinyURL, and see the resulting full URL - as well as how many people have clicked through the shortcut.

Along with Bit.ly's semantic analysis of destination pages, the data unearthed by this new plug-in holds a lot of promise. The plug-in also does some handy tricks on Twitter. It's not perfect yet, but it holds a lot of promise.

Sponsor

We profiled Bit.ly when it launched in July and recommended using it for URL shortening because it makes use of all the valuable data that other URL shorteners leave unused.

The clickthrough data is great to see, but it's not without some serious shortcomings. Bit.ly queries a long list of URL shortening s

Encouraged Commentary: Bringing Natural Conversational Dynamics to CommentingToday

Commenting on blogs is - by and large - broken. Designed with the hope of proffering interaction among bloggers and readers, commenting has generally devolved into a series of one-off responses with little actual conversation. Why? It's not designed to facilitate conversations. That's why you see any number of people - Intense Debate and Disqus, most notably - working to provide technology that enhances the conversational dynamic. Now, a new open source project from Jim Jeffers promises to enhance commenting in a way that is both natural and conversational. Meet Encouraged Commentary.

Sponsor

The new commenting features - built using jQuery - take their inspiration from Ubiquity, allowing users to highlight the sections of text that prompted them to comment and imme

Did Google Just Expose Semantic Data in Search Results?Today

In what appears to us to be a new addition to many Google search results pages, queries about birth dates, family connections and other information are now being responded to with explicitly semantic structured information. Who is Bill Clinton's wife? What's the capital city of Oregon? What is Britney Spears' mother's name? The answers to these and other factual questions are now displayed above natural search results in Google and the information is structured in the traditional subject-predicate-object format, or "triples," of semantic web parlance.

Sponsor

The answers aren't found structured that way on the web pages they come from - Google appears to be parsing the semantic structure from semi or unstructured data. That's something Microsoft paid over $100 million to try to do this summer when it acquired Powerset. Check out these screen shots below.

Report: Cloud-Based Email Cheapest Option for Most CompaniesToday

A new report from Forrester presents a cost analysis of cloud-based email systems in enterprises, such as Google Apps or Yahoo!'s Zimbra. In the report, Forrester argues that cloud-based email services are cheaper than running email on-premise for all companies with less than 15,000 employees. What's more, Google Apps is significantly cheaper than both on-premise solutions and other cloud-based email services - even for very large enterprises. This could spell trouble for Microsoft, as we explain below.

Sponsor

Despite the cost benefits, at this point most companies (56%) are looking to implement a 'hybrid' model of on-premise and external email services. Just 19% plan to migrate their entire email base to a hosted or managed email provider.

Forrester's cost analysis (outlined in full in its report) shows that for the "Information Worker" segment, a large portion of many modern enterprises, cloud-based email is often cheaper. Forrester concluded that "cloud-based email is always cheape

iTunes Goes DRM Free - But No Social Network Just YetYesterday

At the Macworld 2009 keynote today, Apple announced that by the end of this quarter, all 10 million songs available on iTunes will be DRM free [Digital Rights Management]. As of today, 8 million songs will be DRM free, with the other 2 million done by end of Q1 09. This is long overdue, especially considering that Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to the music industry in February 2007 asking them to abolish DRM. Since that time, many of Apple's key competitors have gone DRM free or have significantly loosened the restrictions - Rhapsody in June 08, Yahoo Music in July 08, and Walmart in October 08, to mention just a few. So it's great to see the market leader in online music, Apple, actively killing off DRM too.

Sponsor

DRM-free