"The lock- in that we've had around pages has held us back in terms of innovation and how to use this medium. When we got here [to the Web] there was nothing, and we flopped a 500-year-old metaphor of pages on top of it, a browser that by its name says you will browse, not touch, this content. But it was not meant to be a one-way experience. We're only a fragment of the way into this journey." -John Borthwick, The Real-Time Web and Its Future Living Stories is the name of a new experimental collaboration between Google Labs, the New York Times and the Washington Post that seeks to transcend that 500 year-old metaphor with a parsable flow of news content around big stories. It's very cool. We offer a 5 minute video tour of the project below. Sponsor First, Google's official tour of the experiment. And now our tour of the service, twice as long and more detailed. (Still processing on YouTube though, so a bit fuzzy.) What do you think? It looks inspired by blogging and by databases. I'd like to see more opportunity to comment and a clear method to surface the most high-quality reader comments. I'd like to see a mobile interface. I can imagine other publications employing this kind of system of organization, though, and it's great to see some web-centric innovation. We really are just beginning with this powerful medium. Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is a syndication parter of the NYTimes . Discuss

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Beyond the Web Page: Google, NY Times and Washington Post Launch News Experiment

The dirt is still fresh on the grave of the CrunchPad; we ought to feel guilty for writing this post. But our good friends have been working with a few cohorts on a stealth-mode startup for quite some time - working on the problem of the lightweight, portable, web-friendly device. Only their product is smaller in size and larger in spirit than any netbook or notepad yet seen - perhaps there is a balm in Gilead after all. But you didn't come here for literature; you came to see pics and read specs. So here we go. Sponsor The name of the gadget geek's new muse is the PsiXpda (pronounced sigh ex PDA). It measures 174mm by 95mm by 25mm, and it looks like this: Specifications The device is a hardware nerd's dream, described as "very techy and hackable" by one of the minds behind the project, Ewan Spence. It's smaller than netbooks, roughly 2/3 in length and 1/2 the width. It weighs 430 grams, around 15 ounces. In the closed position, the screen is on the outside. There's no accelerometer, but there are key commands for rotating the screen. The keyboard is backlit - perfect for conference whores, said Spence. It has a VGA webcam and 2-4 hours of battery life, depending on CPU usage. It's got a USB port and a VGA port on the optional docking cradle. It's a full-strength computer with a touchscreen and a QWERTY keyboard. The first units will shit with Windows XP preloaded. Spence expects that hackers will get Android and Chrome OS running on it fairly quickly, as well. As for the web, the PsiXpda will feature bluetooth, WiFi and 3G connectivity. Users will be able to blog, run web apps, play Flash-based games or just browse their hearts out on the browser of their choice. A Pearl of Great Price The drawback? "Well, we're not going to put it in Best Buy," said Spence. This beauty is a pearl of great price for the most discerning only. With a very limited pre-holiday drop and a list price of $830 US (£500) - slightly cheaper than an out-of-contract iPhone - the PsiXpda aims to be the Lamborghini of the notepad/netbook/PDA 2.0 set. "If you look back to the '80s," said Spence, "to the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrums, they were small manufactuers doing a couple thousand machines to see if it worked or not. "One of the benefits of not having a huge staff and a huge VC investment is that we don't have to have unrealistic goals for unit sales," Spence continued. There will be lots of support for those who want to hack the device. Any needed third-party programs or drivers needed will be made available as soon as possible. "I am very interested to see what hackers do," said Spence. "Because of the numbers involved, if you have 10 guys and gals that start going crazy over these things, that's probably going to take us to capacity for the first drop." Provenance & Use Cases The device is the heir apparent to the Psion , which enjoyed an extended love affair with European techies. In the States, those devices were forced to compete with Palm, and lost. You can read an extended history of Psions, or you can take our word for it that Psion Series 5 still commands a dedicated fanbase in Europe. "We were doing this while you guys [Americans] were making the Palm Pilot," said Spence. But now, in the States and elsewhere, the PDA has gone the way of the pager, and consumers are clamoring for technologically lightweight, physically small, ultimately agile devices. The Apple tablet is a fable, and the CrunchPad is, even we are sad to report, the year's most disappointing vaporware. The PsiXpda has appeared on the scene to meet consumer demand at just the right time. "One of the places that's shown interest is someplace like a hospital," said Spence, "just drop it in a doctor's coat. Also, because of the size, it's very non-threatening for looking up information, so it'd work for salespeople. And it's wonderful on a ten-hour flight from London to L.A." In other words, it might be small, but it's by no means a browser-on-a-stick piece of hardware. This beauty was made for people who like to sit on the couch and browse the web, yes; but it also takes into consideration that most people need and want to have a read/write experience online. The machines will be for sale next week. Stay tuned for videos of the review unit. Discuss

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A New, Now Netbook You Can Actually Buy: PsiXpda

Like us, you've probably just come out of a tryptophan-inspired coma on a relative's couch and are jonesing for some tech news. Unfortunately, the newsmakers are likely in the same position. While we cull the tubes for Internet-related happenings, check out this panoply of sites, apps, curiosities, trends and more. Happy Thanksgiving! Sponsor "Somewhat" Frank Gruber Is Thankful For His New Web Project Our good friend Frank Gruber has been working on Thankfulfor.com , a social gratitude journal. Gruber writes that he and partner Jen Consalvo wanted to create "a forum for expressing gratitude routinely as a foundation for happiness and well-being." Frank and Jen with Sir Richard Branson earlier this year. "People come to the site and post what they are thankful for to their personal journal of thanks. People can also choose to send each Thankfulfor post to their social network on Twitter (each post starts with the #thankfulfor hashtag) extending the good vibes far and wide." During the holiday season, Gruber's hosting a Gratitude Challenge for the remainder of the holiday season to encourage users around the world to spread the love. A great idea from a couple of great people! Helping the Hungry Through YouTube Videos Most of the Americans reading this are probably ridiculously stuffed with turkey and the associated edibles, but the good folks at YouTube recognized our annual gluttony as a great opportunity to help the less fortunate. Using their own homepage and blog as a platform, the site asked users, a.k.a. Video Volunteers , to create videos to promote the hunger-related nonprofit of their choice. along with the organization Feeding America and special curator David Arquette, YouTube has selected three submissions on the site. Here's one we liked: Next week, curator Morgan Freeman will kick off another round of submissions, this time focusing on human rights. Search Traffic Gets Seasonal, Economy Remains Slow Hitwise research director Heather Dougherty writes that year after year, Thanksgiving is the peak day for Internet visits to major retail websites, outstripping Black Friday, the day after Christmas, and other traditional big shopping days. Typically, for search engines, Thanksgiving also marks a peak in user searches for major retailers. However, yearly trends show significant drops in traffic and searches between 2007 and 2008. And, Doughtery writes, "The daily visits to the Retail 500 are down compared to last year leading up to the big holiday weekend." Check out the purple line on this graph; it represents search traffic for major retail brands leading up to the holiday, and it's measurably lower than in previous years: Also, the orange line on this graph shows site traffic stats for the same group of retailers. It, too, shows a decline from traffic in previous years. Take heart, online retailers! Stats for traffic coming from email marketing are actually quite robust. Are email marketers with cleverly presented bargains succeeding in these times of woe and want? This seems to be the case. SocialVibe's Facebook App Aims to Feed Folks in Need SocialVibe is all about helping brands and users create positive social change. In a typical SocialVibe setup, a brand "sponsors" users, who take small actions and engagements to raise money for the charity of their choice. The new SocialVibe Facebook app involves partnerships with multiple brands and allows users to help feed the hungry through the UN World Food Programme. Users create virtual Thanksgiving tables, choose one of three decor themes, pick food items to bring, and and invite friends. By engaging in simple, free brand interactions, users are able to furnish their and their friends' tables with turkeys, mashed potatoes, and all the traditional dishes - and best of all, each food item in the app equates to a specific number of meals the UN World Food Programme will be able to provide to hungry families and individuals. That wraps up this year's Thanksgiving around the web. What new sites, apps, or campaigns did you notice and love this year? Tell us all about them in the comments! Discuss

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The ReadWriteWeb Thanksgiving Day Parade

It's only late afternoon and we've already got a Thanksgiving mystery. API strategist Ben Metcalfe and former SVP of Marketing for Tesla Motors

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Building Better Bloggers: The Dream Communication Pipeline

During a ceremony in Iraq's National Museum in Bagdad today, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt announced that the company will digitize the museum's collections. By early next year, all of these images will be available online for free. The museum lost a large part of its collection to looting in 2003. Except for a number of photo ops and press conferences, the museum has remained closed to the public since the beginning of the war in 2003. Most of the museum's collection remains in storage. Sponsor According to Reuters , the company has already taken 14,000 photographs in the museum. It's not clear how Google plans to present these images, though it seems as if Google plans a bit more than just a simple gallery of the photos it took. Eric Schmidt promises "a few surprises" for when the site launches early next year. Google and the U.S. State Department will share the cost of this project. A Government-Sponsored Infomercial for Google? While this sounds like a great idea, the New York Times also reports that there are also some interesting politics at play here. Parts of the museum's collections, for example, have already been digitized by Italy's National Research Center. This collection is already available online . Today's event was sponsored by the US Embassy in Iraq, where, according to the New York Times, US Ambassador Christopher R. Hill described the digitization project as "part of an effort spearheaded by the State Department to bring technology to Iraq." Some of the invited journalists, however, argued that the event was nothing else but a "government-sponsored infomercial" for Google. Discuss

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Google Plans to Digitize Artifacts at Iraq's National Museum

Microsoft announced Internet Explorer 9 at its Professional Developers Conference earlier this month. One of the unique features of IE9 that Microsoft announced at that time was hardware acceleration for its browser. Thanks to technologies like Direct2D and Direct Write that are available for Windows7, Windows developers can use a computer's graphics card to render websites faster. While Microsoft is still working on this project behind closed doors, however, you can already download a Direct2D-enabled pre-release version of Firefox 3.7 today. Sponsor Beyond JavaScript: Fast Browsers Thanks to Direct2D Ever since the release of Google's Chrome, browser developers have emphasized JavaScript performance. There is still a lot of work left to be done in this area, but developers have also started to investigate other parts of the browser that could benefit from new technologies. According to Firefox developer Bas Schouten , the current implementation of Direct2D in this pre-release version will work best with graphics cards that support DirectX10 and WDDM1.0 drivers. On systems that fulfill these specs, though, users are likely to see significantly better performance on graphics-heavy sites. Sites that mostly render static text or depend on Adobe Flash to display their graphics won't benefit greatly from Direct2D. One benefit of Direct2D that users will notice on most sites, however, is improved font rendering. For the time being, this is just an experiment and it isn't clear if Mozilla will integrate this technology into Firefox 3.7. What is clear, is that Mozilla seems to be ahead of Microsoft and by doing its development out in the open and through open source, Mozilla will be able to rely on its vast developer community to test and enhance these features. What About Google and Apple? Some would argue that the release of Google Chrome started this new race towards faster browsers, and as CNet's Stephen Shankland pointed out earlier today, the Chrome development team is quite aware of Mozilla's efforts and investigating the use of hardware acceleration in Chrome as well. As Shankland also notes, these Direct2D efforts shouldn't be confused with other projects like WebGL or Google's Native Client. Direct2D-enabled browsers will be able to render current pages faster, while these other technologies will require developers to redesign their sites. Currently, a lot of these experiments are mostly focused on Windows. With OpenCL in Snow Leopard , Apple already offers a programming interface for using graphics cards for general-purpose computing. Apple is probably also looking at OpenCL to speed up Safari, though we aren't aware of any projects from Mozilla or Google that are making use of OpenCL at this point. Get it Now If you feel like experimenting with a new browser, you can download an early pre-release of an alpha version of Firefox 3.7 here. While we have tested this browser for a while and didn't see any crashes, it is worth remembering that this version isn't meant to be run in a production environment and that most of your extensions will likely not work. Discuss

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Hardware Acceleration: The Next Frontier in the Browser Wars

Google Chrome has begun taking submissions from third party developers. In a blog post written earlier today, Google is asking developers to contribute to the Chrome extensions gallery - an act that will put third party applications on both the Chrome browser and eventually the operating system. Sponsor ReadWriteWeb covered the company's first official extensions in the Spring. Since then Google announced the Chrome OS . As explained in the Chrome OS launch, "Every app you write for the web is a Google Chrome OS app." By embracing 3rd party extensions, Google is one step closer to rendering desktop operating systems obsolete. As extensions replace traditional desktop applications, users will become more accustomed to syncing their data to the cloud. The success of Chrome will depend on whether or not the extensions affect the speed that users have grown to love. The company will open the Extensions Gallery up to "trusted testers" in the near future. Developers can contribute to the project by uploading creations to the Developer Dashboard here . If you need ideas, a good place to start would be to look at the "Most Shared" in the Firefox Add-ons Gallery and think about how you can port some of those gems over for the Chrome experience. Discuss

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The Last Days of Desktop: Chrome Welcomes Third Party Extensions