This article is part of the Open Web Awards, an open, international contest for the best websites and services.

So far, voting in the Blog Plugins category is neck and neck between two services with very similar functions: ShareThis and AddThis. The two plugins make it easy for your blog’s readers to bookmark your site and submit it to social news sites like Digg and Reddit. Several other plugins that help publishers increase page views and engagement are still in the running though. Here’s a quick look at the 10 finalists:

AddThis – Plugin for bookmarking your blog posts and submitting them to social news sites. Recently acquired by Clearspring.

Apture – Links specific words or phrases on a web page to multimedia content like music, video, and Wikipedia entries.

CommentLuv – Lets commenters attach a link to their most recent blog post to their comments.

Leevigraham – Developer of several popular plugins for features like polls, multi-language support, and custom forms.

Ninja Zoo – Plugin for selling your own custom designed products.

Outbrain – Lets users rate blog posts and suggests similar content from your blog and elsewhere.

Plista – Shows similar stories or products.

ShareThis – Lets your readers bookmarks posts and share with friends. Also provides analytics on their sharing habits.

Snap – Adds a “preview” function to the outgoing links on your blog.

Zemanta – Automatically adds links, pictures, and tags to your blog posts.

VOTE OFTEN: One Vote Per Category Per Day

Now it’s time to vote for your favorite blog plugin in the first of two voting rounds. You can vote for one company per day until midnight on November 30th.

Mashable Open Web Awards

Feel free to embed this widget on your own blog or website by clicking the “Grab This” button! For a timeline, rules and information on our 100 blog partners, please visit the Open Web Awards site.

Top Tip For Nominees

You got through? Congratulations! Did you know you can create a custom version of our voting widget above to post to your company blog or website? Just visit the Open Web Awards Widget Creator and check the box to preset a category or company. This means your fans only need to enter an email address to vote - simple!

Start Canvassing for YOUR Candidate!

Want others to vote for your favorite site? Of course you do! Why not leave a comment here and on any of our international partner blogs encouraging other readers to add their support? The more you promote your candidate across these blogs, the more likely it is for your site to proceed to the finals!

OWA Sponsors Love The Web

The Open Web Awards is made possible by our sponsors. By supporting the Open Web Awards, these companies reward and encourage innovative web technologies. We can’t thank them enough for sharing our passion: building great web companies.

Platinum Partner

“PartnerUp brings small business and social networking together to create a community where entrepreneurs find the people, resources and information to grow their businesses.”

Gold Sponsors

“iStockphoto is the world’s leading image market and a revenue-sharing social network. Browse 3.5 million images and videos starting at $1 or become a contributor.”

“With Quintura’s advanced visual-based search and analytics solution, content publishers can increase site usage while creating new ad revenues”

Prize Sponsor

“Infinite and Instant, Zazzle is the only on-demand retail platform for consumers and major brands, offering billions of retail quality, one-of-a-kind products, most of which are produced within 24 hours.”

---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

Movable Type Plugin Connects FriendFeed Comments With Your Blog
Kontera Offers an Annoying and Profitable WordPress Plugin
ShareThis 2.0 Released
Douchebag Wordpress Plugin Helps You Curb Bad Comments
Seesmic Introduces Video Commenting for WordPress Blogs
Revver Plug-in for Wordpress
Microsoft Releases Media Player Plugin for Firefox

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/11/quoteurl.png" width="219" height="219" align="right" align="right" hspace="4" vspace="2" / Firefox only: If you like to copy and paste snippets of web pagesmdash;but want to include the source URL and date and time in one shotmdash;the QuoteURLText add-on's for you. Once installed, just select the relevant quote from a web page and press Ctrl+Shift+C (Win) or Command+Shift+C (Mac) and the selection will be copied along with the URL of the source page. Additional options allow you to include the time browsed and title of the page, as well. Advanced options let you refine the metadata added to the selection in the clipboard further. QuoteURLText is a free add-on download for Firefox browsers. div class="related"a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4292"QuoteURLText/a [via a href="http://www.ghacks.net/2008/11/21/copy-url-to-clipboard-when-copying-text-in-firefox/"gHacks/a]/div/p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=bb6298b4ab1d3e2a65aaaf87a5a1faefp=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=bb6298b4ab1d3e2a65aaaf87a5a1faefp=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=bb6298b4ab1d3e2a65aaaf87a5a1faef" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=WlcJeocc"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=ZMoXyqDl"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=Gbe7vTOw"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=Gbe7vTOw" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=c3D8irn6"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=c3D8irn6" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~4/MwfP-A4AZPw" height="1" width="1"/

iTunes Volume Scripts 1.0.3iTunes Volume Scripts... With these Scripts you can control iTunes' Volume from any App you're currently running.

You NEED Spark, to use these Scripts as they're concepted for.

Special Feature is the support for Growl. (Read more on the Web-Page)
WHAT'S NEWInitial release
REQUIREMENTSMac OS X 10.4.11 or later, Spark.
DEVELOPERMike Schumann
DOWNLOADS31
DOWNLOAD NOW (6 K)
More information

pimg alt="friend_connect_logo_nov08.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/friend_connect_logo_nov08.png" /Just about half a year ago, Google announced the limited beta of a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_friend_connect_manages.php"Friend Connect/a, which allows site owners to display OpenSocial based gadgets on their sites and site visitors to sign in to these social gadgets with their OpenID, AIM, Yahoo, or Google accounts./p pa href="http://www.labnol.org/internet/friend-connect-service-coming-soon/5497/"Amit Agarwal/a has been keeping a close eye on Friend Connect since it was announced and he assumes that the service could go live pretty soon. Just last week, Google published a new a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N94s7ix0JPo"YouTube video/a geared towards users and now the a href="http://www.google.com/support/friendconnect/"support site/a for Friend Connect is available as well./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.openx.org/ck.php?n=12675amp;cb=12675' target='_blank'img src='http://d.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=861amp;cb=12675amp;n=12675' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p pSome of the gadgets Google currently supplies are a comment wall and a ratings gadget. Friend Connect will also work with third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community. To enable these gadgets, all a site owner has to do is to copy and paste some code snippets into their site's HTML./p h2Google Profiles Meets MyBlogLog/h2 pLately, Google has started to put a lot more emphasis on its own user profiles, and Friend Connect makes good use of them. Once you join a Friend Connect enabled site, other users will be able to see information from your profile, though you can set your privacy settings to disallow others from seeing your profile pages as well. In many ways, this is quite similar to a href="http://www.mybloglog.com/"MyBlogLog/a./p h2It's Social, But is it Open?/h2 pimg alt="friend_connect.jpg" align="right" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/friend_connect.jpg" /When Friend Connect was first announced, we were a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_to_join_the_crowd_with.php"concerned/a about the a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_friend_connect_manages.php"direction Google was taking/a with this implementation of the OpenSocial standards. Also, as we noted in our earlier posts, the Friend Connect apps are displayed in an iframe, which is basically a separate web page inside another web page. Because of this, these apps are black boxes that live on your site, but don't allow the site owners to really leverage the data from these apps on their own sites./p pIt is interesting to note that the latest Google video about Friend Connect still prominently features Facebook as a supported service, even though Facebook has decided to eschew OpenSocial in favor of its own platform. The a href="http://www.google.com/support/friendconnect/bin/answer.py?answer=112075amp;topic=16611"help pages/a for Friend Connect don't feature a list of supported services yet./p h2Benefits/h2 pThere are, however, also some clear benefits to using Friend Connect. Through this service, a site owner might be able to create more user loyalty and enthusiastic readers can evangelize your site by publishing their activity on it to their own social network. Visitors will also be able to a href="http://www.google.com/support/friendconnect/bin/answer.py?answer=112073"invite their friends/a on social networks to join your site./p pIn an a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/annc/20080512_friend_connect.html"early press release/a about Friend Connect, Google stated that this initiative was about helping the 'long tail' of sites to become more social. While we might worry about#160; some of the details of Google's implementation, this by itself is a worthy cause, and it will be interesting to see how site owners will implement Friend Connect once it becomes publically available./p pobject width="425" height="344"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/N94s7ix0JPohl=enfs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/N94s7ix0JPohl=enfs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"/embed/object/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/open_beta_of_google_friend_con.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/uipSyofKMPx27XlhlE50u_65UqM/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/uipSyofKMPx27XlhlE50u_65UqM/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=gRuSxagc"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=1035" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=yAj1Gk1C"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=zKp0sCe6"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=zKp0sCe6" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=58EL2udl"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=58EL2udl" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=LMZd2ifH"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=LMZd2ifH" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=Ach1nG0b"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=v2tgidqV"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=1034" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/2NRnDObklNU" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/color_blocks.jpg"Does Adobe think they can out-Google Google? Perhaps. The company is involved with Zoetrope, a joint project with a href="http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/article.asp?articleID=45255"researchers at the University of Washington/a. What they're building is a tool that allows for manipulating the web over time. Instead of the snapshot of the web you see today when googling, Zoetrope will let anyone use keyword searches to discover archived web information and look for patterns in the data found. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.openx.org/ck.php?n=12673amp;cb=12673' target='_blank'img src='http://d.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=861amp;cb=12673amp;n=12673' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p h2About Zoetrope/h2 pAs with a href="http://www.archive.org"the Internet Archive/a, the data in Zoetrope's database is a backup of the entire web, including those pages which have changed over time. But this archive won't be limited to the somewhat inconsistent periodic snapshots of the web's content like the Internet Archive offers. It will encompass everything./p pUsing the intuitive Zoetrope interface, a user could compare historical changes of various data through time by comparing snapshots of different pages on the web. Analyzing different, changing elements on web pages, side-by-side and over a period of time is downright difficult today - if not impossible. But Zoetrope makes it happen./p pThe process is done using Zoetrope "lenses" to draw boxes around elements, connect data from one site to another, and pull up charts of relevant data, all while manipulating a slider to scroll back and forth through time. That may sound hard, but if you watch a href="http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1449756"this video/a, you'll see that it looks surprisingly easy. /p pobject width="425" height="344"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/7C-B7qdClakhl=enfs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/7C-B7qdClakhl=enfs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"/embed/object/p h2For Everyone, Not Just The Computer Savvy/h2 pIn a way, this project is similar to Google's a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_opens_visualization_api.php"new visualization API/a, which lets developers use historical web data to build charts, graphs, gadgets, and the like. However, where Google's tool is aimed at the technically savvy programmer, Zoetrope, on the other hand, is for the average user. Says Dan Weld, a UW computer science and engineering professor who worked on the project, quot;Zoetrope is aimed at the casual researcher. It's really for anyone who has a question.quot;/p pAs noted in the a href="http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/article.asp?articleID=45255"Washington University article on the project/a, example uses of Zoetrope could range from the basic: checking historical rankings of favorite players on a sports team, to the advanced: comparing daily air pollution levels in Beijing to number of world's records broken each day in the 2008 Olympics.#160; /p pquot;Your browser is really just a window into the Web as it exists today,quot; said Eytan Adar, University of Washington computer science and engineering doctoral student who's also a co-author of a href="http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1449756"the research paper/a on the project. /p pquot;When you search for something online, you're only getting today's results...This is really a new way to think about storing information on the Web.quot; /p pThe researchers hope to offer Zoetrope for free as early as next summer. /p pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/zoetrope1.jpg"/p p pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/zoetrope2.jpg"/p pemImage credits: Color, /ema href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/torley/2406178025/"emTorley/em/aem; Others, /ema href="http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/article.asp?articleID=45255"emUniversity of Washington/em/a/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/zoetrope_new_web_crawler_searches_analyzes_ever_changing_web.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/7UHI1YiTsK9O2xeXknhb7alwAjs/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/7UHI1YiTsK9O2xeXknhb7alwAjs/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=gGOe3TpO"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=1035" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=rMXN7xIR"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=jTgV8sSD"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=jTgV8sSD" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=dOloGiUb"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=dOloGiUb" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=z1udEQsG"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=z1udEQsG" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=Mb7TxoHl"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=Bx945L0M"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=1034" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/VpIe0pvsSZ4" height="1" width="1"/

img src="http://c.fsdn.com/fm/screenshots/69392_thumb.jpg" align="right" alt="Screenshot" hspace="10" vspace="10" Visifire is a set of data visualization components powered by Microsoft Silverlight. It lets you create and embed visually stunning animated Silverlight Charts within minutes. Visifire is easy to use and independent of the server side technology. It can be used with ASP, ASP.Net, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails, or just simple HTML. Visifire's unique features are visually stunning animated charts, the ability to be embedded into any Web page in minutes, a tiny footprint (140 KB), and enterprise grade features. hr / strongLicense:/strong GNU General Public License (GPL) hr / strongChanges:/strongbr / This release adds Silverlight and WPF support, blend compatibility, styling, realtime updates, and scrollable charts. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/S5V_np1NX0cFwC0zlLZ1uLcEGx8/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/S5V_np1NX0cFwC0zlLZ1uLcEGx8/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-global/~4/6wYQND5ptPc" height="1" width="1"/

Auction Hunter 1.1b1

Auction Hunter is a native Cocoa application for OS X, built to make your life easier on eBay. It allows you to monitor auctions that you are interested in bidding on, or that you would like to simply observe and store for future reference.

Main features of Auction Hunter are:

• Automatic bidding and sniping tools, that let you set your snipe amount for an item you like, so that Auction Hunter will place the bid with eBay until just a few seconds before the auction ends. This allows you to not attract attention to the auction, causing price to go up. You can also easily cancel or change the snipe when you like, before the auction ends, not risk anything.
• Searching tools, that automatically let you to save and run the same searches on eBay, storing the results in user defined folders. You can also specify a time interval to be used to periodically run the searches. If new items are found, Auction Hunter will change the folder color, so you immediately know there is something new. New added items are also highlighted in yellow!
• Thanks to a built-in powerful database, Auction Hunter allows you to store thousands of auction listings (with thumbnails too!) so you can search through all saved items and what they sold for, even for past auctions no longer available on eBay. If you like, you can also save the full content ofÊ the itemÂ’s web page, and open it later with Safari for future references.
• Auction Hunter periodically updates the information about the auctions you are interested in, and let you know at first sight what is going on, due to the use of colors and bold typeface. For example, a red line says that the auction received no bids or that reserve price is not met, while a black line means that the auction will sell, but not to you. A green line says that you are the high bidder. A line in bold face font, instead, means that you placed a bid on that item. Colors and bold typeface are combined to provide all possible auction status.
• Auction Hunter provides support for all international eBay sites, and also automatically updates all the categories when you launch the application.
• If you have more than one eBay user IDs, for example one for your hobby and one for work, you can use them at the same time!

WHAT'S NEWVersion 1.1b1:

New features:

• Completely revised auction details parsing mechanism.
• Completely revised cookies management.
• Bids and snipes are now performed on the site where the auction was found on.
• When double-clicking on an item, now it will be open in web browser on the site it was found on. You can override this behavior by turning the new checkbox "Always open auctions in browser with preferred site" on ("eBay" preferences panel).
• A new item has been added to the auctions contextual menu, to let you open selected items in browser using one of the supported ebay sites.

REQUIREMENTSMac OS X 10.3.9 or later (including Leopard).
DEVELOPERPowerSolutions
DOWNLOADS9491
DOWNLOAD NOW (4 MB)
More information

Category: Entertainment
Released: Nov 19, 2008
Price: Free

Description:
** GRAND OPENING ** Use Coupon Code GRAND and Save 5% On Any Ticket Purchase. Tiggits provides the best concert, sports, and theater tickets available 24/7 through our guaranteed fast, safe and secure online tickets service. Tiggits is by far your best event tickets option for the most comprehensive inventory of mobile and online tickets. Tiggits is one of the largest full service ticket resellers in the country. Our online tickets specialists are here to help you with all your concert tickets needs and can accommodate any last minute urges to buy tickets on your iPhone or online at Tiggits.com. Tiggits will assist you in finding online tickets information on any theater event, Broadway show, sports event or concert event. Our iPhone application includes online schedules and venue seating charts. We hope you enjoy your experience with Tiggits. You're only a few taps away for fast, safe & secure purchases of mobile online tickets. � Checkout process inside the app� All ticket purchases are encrypted� All ticket purchases are guaranteed� No need to call an operator and talk on the phone for checkout� No offsite web pages to pinch and spread or 'Captchas' for checkout� Concerts, Sports, Theater & Other great entertainment acts and events� Top 25 acts by popularity for Concerts, Sports, theater and Other events� Top Featured long running events for Concerts, Sports, theater and Other events� Family entertainment fun for the whole family� Venue maps in high detail� Search by city, artist and/or venue, find exactly what your looking for� Thousands of shows� Millions of tickets � Expedited delivery options USA and Canada� Ticket purchasing like you would expect on the iPhone� Email support, just tap to request info for any questions� Toll free support, just tap to dial for any questions� Checkout screen with purchase details� Confirmation email with purchase details The best tickets, to the best shows, Tiggits is the best app on the iPhone for ticket purchases, period.

Website: http://www.tiggits.com
Support Website: http://www.tiggits.com

Note: The description above is the official one supplied by the application developer and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of this site or its staff.


Get it on iTunes: Tiggits

Google has gone live with a big change to their result pages, at least for those of you who are logged in (if you’re not seeing it yet, it may still be rolled out for your Google Account). It’s called SearchWiki, and lets you edit the position of the results you’re getting, and add comments to them. SearchWiki was in experimental stage for some time now.

Specifically, you’ll be seeing three icons accompanying results, and further options below the listing:

• Up vote: An up arrow, similar in functionality to what you may know from social sites like Reddit or Digg. Clicking it will turn the icon green and move this specific result up one position. Once upped, a down arrow appears as well, which will trigger the result to fly to the bottom of the listing. (At his blog, Ionut Alex. Chitu mentions: “[Y]our changes are available only when you repeat the query and, in some cases, for similar queries (e.g.: [google.com] in addition to [google]). That means you can’t remove a web page or a domain from all search results”.)
• Remove: An X icon, which will make the result disappear in an animated puff. It won’t be completely gone for you, though; at the bottom of the page you’ll see the note “You have removed results from this page” with an option to hide them altogether, or restore them.
• Comment: A Speech Bubble icon which lets you make a comment on the result. The comment will be public, Google disclaims. Once saved, you’ll still be able to edit or delete your comment later on. Others are now able to upvote your comment or flag it as innapropriate, like on the “All SearchWiki notes” page. (That page also serves as the next best thing to see the pure vote-based ranking.)
• Add result: The plus icon is shown below the organic results, and it lets you add any URL at all to your result page.

Now, when you change something, you won’t immediately shift around the page for others. For now Google says it’s a mere customization on your end. (You can see all your customizations in one place at the “My SearchWiki notes” page.) However, Google indicates in statements provided to Search Engine Land that they won’t completely rule out the possibility of this impacting everyone’s rankings in the future:

<<I asked what would happen if 10,000 people all added “Matt McGee’s Widget Page” to their own results for the phrase [widget]. “We’re always looking at user data as a signal,” [Google’s Cedric Dupont] says. And in a situation like that? “We’re not closing any doors.">>

Also, once a result was upvoted, you’ll be seeing who else voted for this result, though it will only show compactly as e.g. “ 9 11 - Picked by Rat, Mr, yinan.wu, and others.” This may add a more social feeling to search results. (Google calls it a “community” in their announcement post on this, but we need to keep in mind how diverse this group is, even when they might have stumbled upon the same pages in results.) Note this field won’t show your full email address to others, but your nickname, which you can change on your account profile page.

It’s probably also not a huge jump to imagine that Google could one day extract keywords from the comments of a particular result to aid them in their results selection for exotic queries. And as opposed to a web index, which at least in theory anyone with enough servers could build, the upvotes, hides and comment data is something Google will exclusively own thanks to their (massive) user base.

Now, all these new features come with a certain amount of clutter, naturally. Ionut in the comments remarks, “Google should provide a separate wiki mode (placing a link like ’edit search results’, ’change the results’) that adds voting buttons, commenting options.” I guess doing so wouldn’t get as many people to participate though – which would decrease the valuable crowd intelligence Google may tap with this move.

[Thanks Russell O., Tony and Oradzuza!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Now Lets You Upvote Results and Commen ... | Comments]

[Advertisement] Find the right keywords for your campaigns at KeywordDiscovery.com

According to TorrentFreak, The Dark Knight was the most pirated movie of 2008. Ummm, hooray? Somehow I doubt Warner Bros. will include that stat on the DVD packaging. The movie’s been on and off the list of top BitTorrented films throughout the summer as people took video camera footage of the film in theaters or ripped it from screeners.

TorrentFreak’s Top Downloaded Movies on BitTorrent As of Nov. 16, 2008 Rank Last Week Title 1 (new) The Dark Knight 2 1 Traitor 3 4 Tropic Thunder 4 2 WALL-E 5 3 Step Brothers 6 (new) Max Payne 7 9 The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor 8 6 The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian 9 5 Taken 10 8 Burn After Reading

Over at TV by the Numbers‘ breakdown of the most DVRed broadcast TV shows, McDreamy and crew still dominate the list with 4.089 million viewers via DVRs for the week of Oct. 17-Nov. 2. As TVbtN points out, Obama’s infomercial ran during this week but does not appear on this list because of missing data.

It looks like High School Musical clips helped propel John4210 to the top spot on Video Breakouts’ Cool 100 list, followed closely by Chinese TV programming from New Tang Dynasty TV.

Video Breakouts Cool 100 November 17, 2008   Now Last Weeks Name Views Lifetime 1 … 1 John4210 57,152,736 59,596,283 2 … 1 NTDTV 19,927,407 19,927,407 3 4 1 17 BritneyTV 17,564,681 249,185,499 4 … 9 mileymandy 11,362,475 61,037,024 5 2 3 17 expertvillage 8,791,137 283,989,132 6 … 1 TheFrankFactor 7,631,026 7,631,026 7 9 2 17 hollywoodrecords 7,354,131 245,017,407 8 10 2 16 SHOWTIME 6,720,170 114,307,015 9 3 6 18 huluDotCom 6,644,338 130,893,947 10 11 1 15 JonasBrothersMusic 6,208,780 254,213,304   Key:   Gain   Loss   No Change   New  

NOTE: TorrentFreak data is based on http downloads of .torrent files from various BitTorrent sites. The data is collected by TorrentFreak and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently both DVDrips, DVD Screeners and R5 rips are counted. The “back” designation means that the title was in the list before and has reappeared, possibly in a new format.

The Video Breakouts Cool 100 offers a weekly snapshot of the most-viewed Internet video authors and producers. Click any author in the list to see their Author Summary Report. All Video Breakouts lists and statistics are gathered through selective discovery and tracking. Where available, Video Breakouts uses video site Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to retrieve statistics. For sites that do not publish APIs, the company analyzes their HTML web pages to discover assets and track statistics.

pscript type="text/javascript"newVideoPlayer("/iphonebugfsit_gizmodo.flv", 320, 260,"");/scriptimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/stills/iphonebugfsit_gizmodo.flv.jpg" style="display: none;" /According to a Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information press release, the a href="http://gizmodo.com/5075154/the-iphone-os-22-rumor-round-up"eagerly expected iPhone 2.2 operating system update/a will arrive tomorrow, November 21. The release is expected to bring new features, but the Institute's note highlights a major security problem that can make your iPhone to place a call when visiting a malicious web site. This date is a href="http://gizmodo.com/5083116/iphone-22-release-just-10-days-away"in line with the previous rumors/a. bUpdate: here's the video of the security exploit that the iPhone 2.2 release will fix, according to the Fraunhoferians./b/p blockquotepThe Fraunhofer Institute SIT alerted the producers of the iPhone about this issue a month ago. To close this hole, new firmware will be released on November 21./p/blockquote pAccording to Collin Mulliner, the exploit only requires three lines of HTML code, which anyone with basic knowledge of this language can add to any web page./p blockquotepThe scenario: The iPhone user receives an e-mail or SMS with an Internet link. Clicking on the link will open a web site. But suddenly, the iPhone will start calling a phone number without any user intervention. The worse thing is that you can't stop the call, as the cellphone will be gray while the number is dialed. (...) Even amateurs could easily develop a criminal exploit./p/blockquote pThe Fraunhofer Institute says that a similar vulnerability was discovered last month and patched, "but obviously was not enough." [a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sit.fraunhofer.de%2Fpressedownloads%2Fpressemitteilungen%2FiPhoneHack.jsphl=enie=UTF-8sl=detl=en"Fraunhofer SIT/a via a href="http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/11/20/iphone_security_posting_suggests_2_2_firmware_tomorrow.html"Apple Insider/a]/p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=camp;i=1e58aae5be7ab5ff42bbabec5492b326amp;p=1"img style="border:0;" src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=vamp;i=1e58aae5be7ab5ff42bbabec5492b326amp;p=1" border="0" //adiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=p2EpPhQk"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=ffmk2GEs"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=0T9WcGtA"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=0T9WcGtA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=LwHu9HBb"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=LwHu9HBb" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/shqmrzBjjl0" height="1" width="1"/

pscript type="text/javascript"newVideoPlayer("/iphonebugfsit_gizmodo.flv", 320, 260,"");/scriptimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/stills/iphonebugfsit_gizmodo.flv.jpg" style="display: none;" /According to a Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information press release, the a href="http://gizmodo.com/5075154/the-iphone-os-22-rumor-round-up"eagerly expected iPhone 2.2 operating system update/a will arrive tomorrow, November 21. The release is expected to bring new features, but the Institute's note highlights a major security problem that can make your iPhone to place a call when visiting a malicious web site. This date is a href="http://gizmodo.com/5083116/iphone-22-release-just-10-days-away"in line with the previous rumors/a. bUpdate: here's the video of the security exploit that the iPhone 2.2 release will fix, according to the Fraunhoferians./b/p blockquotepThe Fraunhofer Institute SIT alerted the producers of the iPhone about this issue a month ago. To close this hole, new firmware will be released on November 21./p/blockquote pAccording to Collin Mulliner, the exploit only requires three lines of HTML code, which anyone with basic knowledge of this language can add to any web page./p blockquotepThe scenario: The iPhone user receives an e-mail or SMS with an Internet link. Clicking on the link will open a web site. But suddenly, the iPhone will start calling a phone number without any user intervention. The worse thing is that you can't stop the call, as the cellphone will be gray while the number is dialed. (...) Even amateurs could easily develop a criminal exploit./p/blockquote pThe Fraunhofer Institute says that a similar vulnerability was discovered last month and patched, "but obviously was not enough." [a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sit.fraunhofer.de%2Fpressedownloads%2Fpressemitteilungen%2FiPhoneHack.jsphl=enie=UTF-8sl=detl=en"Fraunhofer SIT/a via a href="http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/11/20/iphone_security_posting_suggests_2_2_firmware_tomorrow.html"Apple Insider/a]/p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=d0088a1e2338ee4d383558b116b6f2acp=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=d0088a1e2338ee4d383558b116b6f2acp=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=d0088a1e2338ee4d383558b116b6f2ac" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=WrkC5xHN"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=8snnm0XV"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=nYBNPBRt"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=nYBNPBRt" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=Qkp9ND9a"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=Qkp9ND9a" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/GjnyKq2Ms_Q" height="1" width="1"/

When we first wrote about Genwi a year ago, it was asocial feed reader with content feeds that could be organized by different categories (blogs, news, videos, music, podcasts) and shared with your friends. Today, it is relaunching with a completely new design that takes into account what your friends are doing across the Web as well.

You can think of Genwi as a combination of Google Reader and FriendFeed with sophisticated search, auto-categorization, and filtering features. As before, Genwi is a super RSS feed reader. It suggests feeds by category, or you can add your own (via search or by importing an OPML file from another reader). You can also invite your friends by giving Genwi permission to match its members to your contacts in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, LinkedIn, AOL, Outlook and elsewhere (although it does not have Facebook integration yet).

Once you do that, you can track your the social activity of your friends across the Web, just like on FriendFeed. Anytime a contact does something on Twitter, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, or other social media sites, it appears on Genwi. (The other supported services are Vimeo, Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr, Pownce, Yelp, Upcoming, Last.fm, iLike, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, Jaiku,Webshots, Picasa, Smugmug, Zoomr, Furl, Reddit, Mixx, and Diigo).

So far, so what. But Genwi has some interesting features that could push the ball forward in the Web filtering/lifestreaming game. Genwi treats the Web as a collection of information objects. An object can be a blog post, a video, a streaming song, a photo, a Tweet, a Digg. Genwi lets you grab the objects you care about either directly through RSS feeds or indirectly by paying attention to what your friends do and presents them all in a manageable, personalized, searchable feed. Explains Genwi co-founder Killian P. McKiernan:

At first a web page was a published document. It has evolved to a collection of objects—wading through all of these objects by searching and loading pages may not be the most efficient way to consume them. It might be better to bring in all the objects that matter to you and create a context enabling you to filter and directly consume what is most interesting.

Once all the objects are ingested into Genwi, it starts to do some interesting things with them. Each post/video/song/object can be filtered by type and category, as well as by most popular, highest rated, and most recent. They can be rated, shared, or added as a favorite. All of your friends favorites show up in your wire (which is what Genwi calls your personal super feed). The most popular items are available in a public wire, which can also be sorted in various ways. When you search for things, favorite items across the network come up top, adding an element of social rank to the searches.

There are other features that noteworthy as well. You can follow other people’s wires without having to “friend” them. If you wan to send a “quick post” to all your friends, it will appear Twitter-like in all of their feeds (FriendFeed has something similar called “messages”). It handles all sorts of media quite adeptly. And it does a better job of showing what’s popular on the service in a very granular fashion.

On the downside, the site takes longer to load than FriendFeed and is not quite as responsive. But it has a few tricks worth checking out.

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

Motivation: The advent of sequencing and structural genomics projects has provided a dramatic boost in the number of uncharacterized protein structures and sequences. Consequently, many computational tools have been developed to help elucidate protein function. However, such services are spread throughout the world, often with standalone web pages. Integration of these methods is needed and so far this has not been possible as there was no common vocabulary available that could be used as a standard language.

Results: The Protein Feature Ontology has been developed to provide a structured controlled vocabulary for features on a protein sequence or structure and comprises ~100 positional terms, now integrated into the Sequence Ontology (SO) and 40 non-positional terms which describe features relating to the whole-protein sequence. In addition, post-translational modifications are described by using a pre-existing ontology, the Protein Modification Ontology (MOD). This ontology is being used to integrate over 150 distinct annotations provided by the BioSapiens Network of Excellence, a consortium comprising 19 partner sites in Europe.

Availability: The Protein Feature Ontology can be browsed by accessing the ontology lookup service at the European Bioinformatics Institute (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ontology-lookup/browse.do?ontName=BS).

Contact: gabby@ebi.ac.uk

There is a wireless router (non Apple) on the second floor of my house (my dad's office), the only problem is that it cannot reach most of downstairs. For example it cannot reach my bedroom, only my parent's bedroom, which is directly below the router. This means I have to go to my parent's room if I want to go online on my Macbook. Bummer :(. And my sister is getting a laptop for her birthday, so something needs to be sorted.

So to try and solve the problem, my dad got an Airport Express (the 802.11n one) in order to try and bridge or extend the network downstairs. But neither of us know how to get it working. I tried setting it up with the Airport Utility but with no success. And a trip to the Apple Store didn't help either. The guy at the Genius Bar told us the router would work bridging/extending the network, but no joy either.

I've been told that it needs to be set up with the router's setting on a web page, but I've not been able to access them (admin privileges?).

In short, I need an Airport Express to bridge/extend a Wi-Fi network from a non-Apple Wi-Fi router. Any thoughts? Cheers :)