ReadWriteWeb

It's time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. This week Nokia launched an iPhone competitor called the Tube, Netflix released an API, Google Blog Search re-designed, and we ran a poll about Flash coming to iPhone. On the trends side, we investigated the lack of commercial RDF apps in the Semantic Web, reviewed 5 insightful science books, launched our 'Gritty Entrepreneurs' series, and interviewed a co-founder of last.fm. We also brought you the latest from our new Enterprise Channel.

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Semantic Web entrepreneur David Provost has published a report about the state of business in the Semantic Web and it's a good read for anyone interested in the sector. It's titled On the Cusp: A Global Review of the Semantic Web Industry. We also mentioned it in our post Where Are All The RDF-based Semantic Web Apps?.

The Semantic Web is a collection of technologies that makes the meaning of content online understandable by machines. After surveying 17 Semantic Web companies, Provost concludes that Semantic science is being productized, differentiated, invested in by mainstream players and increasingly sought after in the business world.

What could possibly be bigger news than the supposed heart attack suffered by Apple CEO Steve Jobs? The fact that it's simply not true. The rumor which spread like wildfire across the internet this morning was based on a report from CNN's citizen journalism site, iReport.

According to citizen reporter, Johntw: "Steve Jobs was rushed to the ER just a few hours ago after suffering a major heart attack." Apple quickly squashed the story, claiming it to be untrue. Did citizen journalism just fail us? You bet it did.

This week we interviewed one of the founders of online music service last.fm, Richard "Mr Scrobble" Jones. We're running the interview in 3 parts, over 3 days. This is Part 3 about design and features; following on from Part 1 about last.fm and its competition and Part 2 about business models.

In this post we explore last.fm's feature set, how it compares to MySpace Music, and what we can expect to see from last.fm in the near future. Richard Jones also discusses how last.fm has managed to avoid the legal difficulties that have plagued Pandora.

When Microsoft announced the launch of its Live Search Cashback rebate program, it quickly became the laughingstock of the tech blogosphere and this week's launch of Live SearchPerks definitely did not help. However, according to the latest data from Hitwise, Microsoft's Cashback promotion is actually working and is helping live.com to keep its search traffic stable, even as Google's market share is rising.

CERN today officially unveiled the massive computer network that will crunch the enormous amount of data coming from CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). CERN expects that the LHC will produce around 15 petabytes of data every year. While the LHC was in its planning stages, CERN's IT department decided that the only realistic way to handle this amount of data would be by relying on the then still novel idea of grid computing. CERN's grid consists of 100,000 processors at 140 scientific institutions in 33 countries.

Earlier this week, parody musician Weird Al Yankovic announced that he would start releasing songs on iTunes right after he finishes them, bypassing the standard album model for a faster and more flexible approach. It looks like Yankovic made a deal with Apple, as iTunes will have exclusive rights to these new songs for the first two weeks. The first of these new songs will be available on October 7. Kid Rock, on the other hand, will now allow Rhapsody to carry his music, but does not allow a la carte downloading of his songs.

In this heated U.S. election season, both presidential campaigns have been using multichannel marketing techniques that have included everything from wikis to web sites and text messages to Twitter. It now appears that one of those channels, mobile marketing, is better at reaching Democratic voters than Republicans. But why is that? 

Contrary to popular belief, Africa is not completely absent from the Internet. In fact, the continent at large is undergoing a connectivity revolution unlike anything it has ever seen. Mobile phones in particular are propagating at an incredible rate, with penetration ranging from 30% to 100%. The average is 30.4% and there are 280 million subscribers in total, making Africa the fastest growing mobile market in the world.

The point of this series is to highlight African contributions to social media and, in turn, reveal how social media is changing Africa.