It's no secret that we at ReadWriteWeb have a lot of love for startups that make their homes outside Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. Over the last year, we decided to make a few videos spotlighting some unique, unexpected locations where startups thrive, where tech scenes are vibrant, where cooperation outstrips competition, and where creativity runs rampant. One of the first cities we'd like to introduce you to is home to between 150 and 170 startups as well as a thriving entrepreneurial and creative community. Welcome to Boulder, Colorado. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! With the startup accelerator program at TechStars acting as a lightning rod, this area has grown from an earthy university town to a true hotbed of innovation. In certain parts of downtown, you can't throw a rock without hitting some startup's offices, and I could barely walk three blocks without bumping into at least one entrepreneur, developer, or designer working at a company such as Threadless or AOL. We interviewed a couple of local startup advisors and one startup team about the culture and community in Boulder. Watch and listen to what they have to say; there are more than a few reasons tech-minded residents love this gorgeous mountain town. Discuss

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A Startup Movie: Never Mind the Valley, Here's Boulder

In an ironic twist of fate for 2009, Fox's IGN Entertainment, a company known for its game reviews of products like Zombie Apocalypse acquired What They Play . The newest member of Fox Interactive is touted as the "family guide to video games" and offers reviews, warnings and suggested products. Under the umbrella company of What They Like , What They Play uses the "Entertainment Software Rating Board" (ESRB) to warn parents of games containing explicit lyrics, cartoon violence and drug references. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! In an age when gross-out sites like goatse are just a click away, a number of services offer parents the information they need to find quality online entertainment. While past generations were raised on unfiltered television and video games, today's parent take a more active role in the process of media consumption. AOL's PlaySavvy : PlaySavvy is another site that offers parents a chance to check out age-appropriate kids games. Similar to What They Play, this site lists the ESRB ratings next to games and information is categorized by topic and gaming system. Products for console favorites like Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii are often featured on the site. AOL also offers parents daily articles and a section to view the most popular games. Parents' Choice : Established in 1978, this site is run by the Parents' Choice Foundation - a nonprofit organization that offers awards to the top children's media and toys. Some of the award categories include websites, video games, DVDs, software, television programming and toys. This site definitely skews towards narrative-based educational materials. If your kid has a shorter attention span, you might want to visit PBS Kids instead. Common Sense Media : Common Sense media is a nonprofit organizations dedicated to offering parents reviews and suggestions on appropriate content. The group produces movie, website, TV, game, book and music ratings as well as a number of educational tools for classroom use. The site can be personalized for kids between the ages of 2-17 years old and it's available in English and Spanish. This site tends to weigh the benefits of mainstream media sites. PBS KIDS Island : This site offers parents reading resources, videos and games in English and Spanish. While the majority of the content is best queued up by a parent or teacher, the videos are of particularly high quality and completely commercial free. National Geographic for Kids : This site offers kid-friendly games, videos, stories and activities for nature lovers. The same photography that has made National Geographic a hit with grownups is likely to please kids. Not surprisingly, the video content is equally compelling. Discovery Kids offers a similar experience and is a great site for visual learners. Totlol : Totlol is a parent-moderated version of YouTube. The site offers video options specifically designed for children and even offers "age optimized interfaces" to ensure that kids of different ages get the most appropriate content. In 2008, ReadWriteWeb covered Totlol's beta launch . As of today the site charges a $3 per month subscription fee or $54 until your child grows up. Photo Credit: Swaminathan Discuss

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ReadWriteWeb's List of Kid-Friendly Online Resources

OpenID, the open standard for federated user identity across multiple websites, is led by the OpenID Foundation . That organization announced the election of its newest Board members today. These are the people who will be moving and shaking OpenID on a policy and standards level. While systems like Facebook Connect and Twitter Auth are making fast progress in offering website users easy access to their primary identity, social and activity data when visiting sites all around the web - OpenID technology is making progress as well. Here are the three new leaders elected to help advance that agenda. Sponsor The OpenID Foundation has both Community and Corporate members. There is always one more community member than there is corporate members. You can see the as yet un-updated list of all the members here . Below are the three newly elected members. Marc Frons , CTO for New York Times digital operations At LinkedIn (Past gigs include Dow Jones, AOL and SmartMoney.com) On Twitter (Joined April, 2009) On Times People , the NYT link sharing network Daniel Jacobson , Director of Application Development at NPR On LinkedIn . On Twitter . Joined July, 2008, communicates with @nprtechteam , @magicmerl , @acarvin and @khopper . John Bradley , engineer On LiveJournal . Works on OpenID for government . Discuss

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Meet the New OpenID Foundation Board Members

As part of the European Union's antitrust agreement with Microsoft , the company will be required next year to show a list of alternatives to Internet Explorer to any Windows user with IE installed as their default browser. Love or hate the government intervention, it's notable to see which browsers are about to get a big boost in user numbers. The EU says increased viability in the browser market will lead to more competition and more innovation. Here are the companies that will get a first crack at new levels of market viability in Europe. Sponsor On the Front Page - The Best Known 5 The first page of the Choice Screen, which users will be presented with when they first turn on their computers or when they click a link for it later, will feature whichever five browsers have the largest market share over the previous 6 months. Microsoft will begin showing the page to users in March, 2010. Right now the top 5 will include, in the order listed on an EU page about the program: Apple Safari - that's right, even for Windows! Google Chrome - so soon. If Chrome can grow so fast, it makes you wonder if government intervention is really needed. Of course, Chrome has been promoted prominently on Google pages. That could become part of the next antitrust issue. Microsoft Internet Explorer - gets better all the time, even with dominant market share. Couldn't the EU just require people to stop using IE 6? Mozilla Firefox - the classic that's most effectively challenged IE. In fact, it's done so pretty effectively. Too bad Chrome now runs circles around its performance. Opera - loved by mobile users, loved by Europeans. Below the Fold - The Smaller Challengers Users will be able to scroll the Choice Screen horizontally and see the next 7 most popular browsers at the time. Here's who the EU lists as those browsers today. AOL - chuckle if you will, but AOL is doing a lot of innovative work with social networks and lifestreaming these days. Maxthon - is a popular browser in China and has its sights set on topping Opera in Europe. K-Meleon - says its a super-fast Windows browser built on Gecko, the same layout engine Firefox uses. Flock - is a Mozilla-powered browser that integrates a whole lot of social features. It's got such a great feature set that we recently asked Why don't you love Flock? Avant Browser - says that it, in fact, is the browser that's the fastest. It includes an inline RSS reader and a number of other interesting features. Sleipnir - is a highly-customizable browser that says it's big in Japan. Slim Browser - a Windows browser focused on automating processes. That's the field, so far! Do you think this move will foster increased innovation? Do you think it's needed? Discuss

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Meet the 12 Lucky Browsers European IE Users Will Be Shown Next Year

At the close of a whiz-bang year, OpenID has a lot to be proud of. With a community of 9 million sites that use OpenID logins and 1 billion individual users, OpenID has effectively revolutionized the way we are able to create and maintain portable identities. Best of all, it's not just bloggers and geeks who sang OpenID's praises: The U.S. federal government got on board this year, too. Sponsor OpenID accounts are enabled by such providers as AOL, Blogger, Flickr, Google, LiveJournal, MySpace, Verisign, WordPress and Yahoo with announcements of upcoming OpenIDs from Microsoft and PayPal. Sites that allow users to login with OpenID range from major retailers and music labels to news organizations and social sites. As for the government, at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, DC, earlier this year, the General Services Administration and several government agencies announced they would adopt OpenID as part of the White House's Open Government Initiative. Participating companies included Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, Equifax, AOL, VeriSign, Acxiom, Citi, Privo and Wave Systems. On the government side is the Center for Information Technology (CIT), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and related agencies. Not only is the government's involvement a vote of confidence for OpenID's innovation; it also speaks to the product's security progress, which was spearheaded by security committee head and PayPal exec Andrew Nash. In addition to developing and spreading the OpenID product, there's also the OpenID Foundation, which appointed its first executive committee, including Chris Messina and Don Thibeau, in 2009. Portable identity is one of our favorite themes from this year, and we applaud what OpenID has been able to accomplish. What do you look forward to seeing from the product, the foundation and OpenID partner sites in the year to come? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Discuss

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OpenID Ends 2009 With 1 Billion Users

In my recent post about the rise of content farms like Demand Media and the current incarnation of AOL, I posited that Google (and search in general) risks becoming less relevant as the Web gets drowned in lesser quality content. This is due to the scale at which these content farms are operating at - Demand Media alone pumps out 4,000 new pieces of content every day . The solution is of course for Google and other search engines to find better ways to surface quality content , whether that be from traditional news media, blogs or even Demand Media ( not all of its content is poor quality ). So how can Google evolve to identify quality content better? Sponsor Quality! Pah, Does Google Need to Bother? Perhaps we should first answer the question: why should Google be worried about the quality issue? After all, it has a virtual monopoly on the search market. The obvious and PR answer is that Google wants to provide the best search results possible for its users. But there is another big reason why Google needs to do something. So-called "quality" content providers are already well advanced in routing around Google, or at least making them less relevant. As I wrote yesterday, Reuters is onto something with its subscription business model. According to Chris Ahearn , President of Media at Thomson Reuters, the company already makes the "vast majority of its revenues" from subscription-based business models targeted to "vertical and niche markets." Reuters also provides services as well as just content. Bloomberg is another leading media company finding success with this strategy. The subscription model is making inroads, because the users themselves are flocking to it. A prime example comes from VC Paul Kedrosky , who became frustrated after doing various Google searches for "dishwasher reviews" and getting unsatisfactory results. He says that this has made him "more willing to pay for things" - in that case a Consumer Reports review of dishwashers. As Kedrosky archly noted, "the opportunity cost of continuing to try to sort through the info-crap in Google results was simply too high." What Google Can Do Google surely knows that quality (or lack thereof) in its index is a problem. As one part of the solution, Google is currently experimenting with real-time search results from social media sites like Twitter, MySpace and even Facebook. The theory is that users are more likely to get timely, relevant results by tapping into their social network. That's all well and good, but real-time search is unlikely to give you better results on the dishwasher search and other topic-focused search queries. So what else can Google do to identify and surface quality material? Some readers in Sunday's post (Tadhg, Charles Coxhead and others) argued that Google's current algorithm accounts for quality well enough, through the link economy. But many others thought that Google must improve its ranking of quality. Here were some of our readers' suggestions: Neutralize the link dilution; A.J. Kohn , who further wrote that "the introduction of SearchWiki, their measurement of short-clicks versus long-clicks, the new domain/brand SERP listing, snippet links, and use of breadcrumbs all point to a gathering movement to help determine quality without such a reliance on an ever diluted link ecosystem." Do a better job ranking authority; for more on this read Clay Shirky's post on "Algorithmic Authority." Introduce a user rating system; Tony Masinelli. Leverage sharing networks to determine where the quality is; Alex Kessinger . Special curation and algorithms on top of that; William Mougayar, whose company Eqentia does precisely that. p2p recommendation (i.e. filtering through your peers); Nick Taylor . Capture engagement data; Mark Littlewood . Give special weightings to categories of content, e.g. content farms, social media bookmarks blogs and Twitter; Aaron Savage . Use anti-spam type software to identify content that makes too much use of keywords; Barry . Track reputation against authors rather than URLs - a 'PageRank for People'; Marshall Clark . These are all great ideas. Google is almost certainly already doing some of these things already - as will other search companies. John Battelle is expecting a "major breakthrough" in search in 2010 and I hope he's right. One thing is for sure, Google will need to do more in 2010 if it's to stay ahead of the content farms and continue to surface quality content for its millions of users. Discuss

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How Google Can Combat Content Farms

Last week, we told you about peer-to-peer and torrent file-sharing sites were being systematically shut down all over China . Not too long before that, we let you know about file-sharing being monitored by a major ISP in the UK. Now, Israeli ISPs are throttling P2P network access, too, as confirmed in a report just released by an Israeli cyberlaw attorney and a partner news site. Whether you consider file-sharing an affront to content creators and copyright-holders everywhere or whether you see P2P networks as a permissible and valid way for users to exchange data, this trend is gaining considerable momentum around the world. Where will P2P restrictions pop up next? Sponsor In their research, tech attorney Jonathan Klinger and researchers involved with the Israeli website Ynet found that two of the three major ISPs in Israel are interfering with user traffic and might be conducting deep packet inspection. Traffic shaping is a practice sometimes used by some ISPs to discourage the use of certain applications. A couple of years ago, Comcast caught some heat from users and media for filtering user traffic when torrent files were being downloaded, even causing some to speculate that the ISP was violating U.S. law by prohibiting this traffic. Eventually, Comcast did strike a deal with BitTorrent to allow protocol-agnostic traffic management, but only after the sparring had been brought to the attention of the Federal Communications Commission. It's currently unclear whether Israeli ISPs are filtering traffic due to piracy concerns or simple due to bandwidth concerns, as shared files can often amount to multi-gigabyte, hours-long downloads. However, traffic-shaping that blocks P2P protocols can also apply to VoIP calls, IM clients and other applications. Although P2P traffic is associated with illegal downloads, nothing about the protocols themselves is inherently illegal. "The element common to all P2P services," reads the Israeli report, "is the lack of economical benefit to the ISP." Klinger noted that although complaints have been brought to media outlets and ISPs since 2007, the ISPs have typically ignored these criticisms. Netvision and Internet Zahav were the two ISPs determined by this research to be blocking file-sharing traffic. Bezeq International was the third ISP investigated. Although Bezeq was cleared by this particular investigation, a plug-in introduced last year from popular bittorrent client Vuze shows that this ISP, too, throttles and disrupts file-sharing network traffic. In response to the findings presented by Ynet and Klinger, all three of the investigated ISPs gave typically canned responses claiming to offer users excellent surfing experiences. Israeli Communications Ministry rep Dr. Yechiel Shabi told Ynet, "The research materials relayed to us paint a picture which arouses the need for thorough examination. After we become familiar with the study's findings, we shall consider the need for interference, supervision or regulation of the matter." So, while we wait to see what results this report will yield in Israel, we are left to ponder the perturbing question: Where will traffic-shaping pop up next to prevent P2P activity? Take another look at the findings from Vuze's traffic-monitoring plug-in . You'll see that ISPs around the world - including Verizon, BellSouth, AOL, AT&T, Charter, Road Runner and ISPs in France, Italy, Germany, Poland, the UK and the Middle East, to name a few locations - are already interrupting traffic. Vuze's researched was released in April 2008; in August, the FCC declared that ISPs should not be allowed to target and interrupt P2P applications. Still, suspicious Americans and other users around the world should consider using a tool such as the EFF's Switzerland to determine whether torrent downloads and VoIP calls are being interrupted by their ISP. Do Israeli or other ISPs have the right or the moral imperative to throttle traffic in this manner? Do they have the need or right to examine the applications, files, and protocols being employed by users on their networks? Or do ISPs around the globe need to read the wiki on net neutrality and get their act together? Let us know your experiences and opinions in the comments. Discuss

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P2P Sharing Being Blocked Around the World, Where Next?