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Mr. Microphone 2.0: Microsoft Songsmith Puts Even the Worst Lyrics to MusicToday

Like to sing in the shower or in the car? Want to subject others to your incoherent warblings as if they were a real song? Microsoft Songsmith may be for you. And if you're a professional lyricist, musician, or someone with real musical talent? Songsmith may be incredibly helpful for you, too.

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The technology is actually quite impressive. Songsmith takes a cappella vocals - no matter how disjointed - and interprets a musical melody to lay behind them. Meaning? Meaning that with no musical talent whatsoever, you can now compose, record, and share songs with whomever is willing to listen.

But what if you actually have talent? Songsmith could be of potential use to you, too.

"Songwriters can use Songsmith as an 'intelligent scratchpad' to work with new melodies, quickly turning your scratch recordings of new ideas into richer, deeper explorations. Musicians can also play instruments right into Songsmith, instead of singing."

No doubt a

Cramming for Your Next Exam? Try CramberryToday

Just about everyone has been exposed to the concept of flashcards. Whether trying to study for a geography quiz or learning a foreign language, the method of using Q&A cards to train your brain to remember has remained a popular study method. But, the concept hasn't really made the leap to the Web, until now. Introducing Cramberry, the flashcards you know and love, only on the Web.

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Granted, Cramberry is incredibly simple. The cards are fairly rudimentary, but they serve the purpose. Quite frankly, they're better than the scribbled notes on index cards that many of us used. And yet, Cramberry has the potential to be incredibly useful by taking a familiar technique and making it much easier to use.

After logging in, you will be prompted to create sets of cards with any information you want to study. Questions on the front, answers on the back.

Once the set is ready, you can begin flipping through the cards, testing your knowledge. Then, you can mark whether you got the answer right or wrong. All of this information feeds the algorithm, which serves up the cards in an order that helps you pra

Report: Apple Dominates the Mobile WebToday

The latest data from AdMob, the world's largest mobile advertising marketplace, shows that Apple now dominates the mobile web in the U.S. with a 48% market share. This growth, interestingly enough, does not just come from the iPhone, but the iPod touch also saw a meteoric rise in usage during the last month. Traffic from the iPod touch to AdMob's network in the U.S. increased 3.4 times from November to December.

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Overall, requests from the iPod touch increased from 18 million in July 2008 to 292 million in December. While traffic from the iPod touch grew at a steady clip over the last few month, a good part of this growth came, not unsurprisingly, in the week after Christmas. After the iPhone (10%), the iPod touch (4.7% ) is now the second most popular mobile device on sites that run AdMob's advertising. Overall, iPhone requests grew 86% since November.

Just looking at the smartphone market, Apple also continues t

Semantic Web Wish List 2009Yesterday

At the end of last year we presented our list of the top 10 Semantic Web Apps of 2008. ReadWriteWeb reader Zoltán Andrejkovics wrote in to us afterwards, suggesting that we do a post looking at what Semantic Web apps we'd like to see emerge in 2009. Zoltán gave us 5 apps he wants to see this year, and we also asked our Twitter friends for their views (you can follow ReadWriteWeb on Twitter here).

We at ReadWriteWeb are tracking the Semantic Web space closely - so far we've identified 20 products (see our first 10, then 10 more) that we're paying particular close attention to. But we know there is a lot of opportunity yet for commercializing the Semantic Web, so we encourage you to add your wish list in the comments.

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At ReadWriteWeb, we look for more commercial Web apps - whether they be consumer or enterprise. So here are 5 of those we'd like

Video: History of the InternetYesterday

If you've ever wondered how the Internet was born, but can't be bothered reading a whole book on the subject, check out this short animated documentary from Milah Bilgil. Entitled History of the internet, it does a great job explaining time-sharing, file-sharing, arpanet and internet. The video uses a new type of info-graphic called PICOL icons, which will soon be made available for free on picol.org. PICOL stands for Pictorial Communication Language - it's a project that aims to create "a standard and reduced sign system for electronic communication." PICOL is free to use and open to alter.

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History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

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