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Sponsor Opportunities
A quick note that we have a couple of sponsor slots available for October. Read/WriteWeb is currently the 24th ranked blog in the world according to Technorati and is one of the leading web 2.0 blogs. We're also among the 25 Largest Tech Business Websites, according to eBizMBA. Read/WriteWeb is read by early adopters, analysts, CIOs, VCs, developers, designers, leading thinkers. Sponsoring us helps you reach the hubs of influence - and you'll also be supporting a quality tech news source, which is growing every month.To enquire, please email the editor Richard MacManus.

Latest Read/WriteWeb Jobs & Events
Check out the Read/WriteWeb Job Board, for jobs and events in Web technology and new media. Here is a sample of what's currently available:Nincha is looking for a part-time/freelance PHP developer to develop a prototype for a web startup/application/idea."New Interactive from New York is looking for a Senior Web Designer.Nature Publishing Group is looking for a talented Web Software Developer.Dada USA is seeking a search engine marketing specialist.Email marketing company Emma is looking for a talented software developer.Fanzter Inc., a CT-based software and technology start-up, seeks a Ruby on Rails software developer to help design and implement web applications.To post a job, please go to the Read/WriteWeb Job Board. Thanks JobThread for hosting it.We also recently started an Events Board, thanks to new startup Eventbee.Widget Summit is a two-day conference on widgets and content syndication, running from 15-16 Oct. You can buy tickets here.IT Connect Expo presents the leading...

FeedEachother Releases Smart, Social RSS Reader
If you got excited about Streamy, the feature rich super-social RSS reader that made the rounds among the review blogs last month (see our review), then you should check out FeedEachother. Unlike Streamy, FeedEachother is open today for anyone to use.Think the RSS reader market is all wrapped up? While major market share may not be redistributed any time soon, these edge-case feed readers off some interesting innovations and could serve your needs better than the big guys. Read on for a summary of what FeedEachother does very well.FeedEachother was built by a former developer from Yahoo! Answers and another now at craft social network Etsy. It's easy to tell that these guys have backgrounds in some of the leading projects on the web today because they have obviously been paying attention to discussions online and have executed well in designing their feed reader accordingly. The interface will feel very familiar to anyone who uses Google Reader. (See screenshot below.)Here's...

Google to Email Your Grandparents About New Videos Online
The Official Google Blog just announced that Google Alerts will now be available for video search queries. When new results for a video search you're interested in has new results available, you can get an email with links to clips on not just Google Video and YouTube, but on a handful of other video hosting sites as well.Video is huge, I think it's established that it's not a fad. Comscore reported last week that US consumers are watching an average of 3 hours of video online in the month of July. It's a lot higher than that in my house, but I'd be very interested to see how that number compares with other forms of media consumption like movie theaters and newspapers.Though it might seem small, the inclusion of video search in Google Alerts could be big. Sometimes it's the little things that make a big difference, especially when it's Google that does them. I'm willing to guess that there are as many or more people in this world who use the Google Alerts system as there...

10 More Future Web Trends
Our post a few weeks ago, 10 Future Web Trends, received a lot of excellent feedback. The most interesting was from people offering alternative future web trends to the ones we had chosen. In fact there were some grumblings that our 10 picks were not futuristic enough - so in this post let's see if we can address that! There's nothing smarter than 'collective intelligence' after all...From the comments and trackbacks to the original post, plus some hunting around of my own, here are 10 more future web trends:1. Integration into everyday devices (suggested by Mark Schoneveld); As examples Mark mentioned your grocery-ordering refrigerator and your health-monitoring bathroom. Commenter #63, Jack, had a nice term for this: "device pervasiveness". One can imagine Microsoft and Google battling it out in this domain over the coming years.2. Hyperlocal; Sebastien Provencher forsees "the transformation of the web into an exciting hyperlocal tool."...

Apple Helps Amazon Sell MP3s on Day One
The biggest news of the day so far has been Amazon's launch of their DRM-free MP3 store, which competes with Apple's iTunes. I find it kind of amusing, however, that Apple is actually driving some sales for Amazon on its first day in the DRM-free MP3 biz.As the graphic to the right shows, the #1 and #10 song for sale at Amazon today is '1 2 3 4' by Feist. Why does this relatively obscure Canadian indie rock singer have two of the top ten best selling tracks on Amazon? Presumably because her single was recently featured in the new Apple iPod Nano commercials, which actually propelled her onto the Billboard Hot 100 chart for the first time (#61 on September 20th).See our coverage of AmazonMP3 by Marshall Kirkpatrick, and also check out the coverage at our network blog last100. Check out the iPod Nano commercial below:

SceneCaster Launching 3D Scene Creation App at DEMOfall
Yesterday, when we published our companies to watch list for DEMOfall 2007, Robert Scoble commented that we should have included a company called SceneCaster on our list. "SceneCaster is aimed at Second Life," he wrote. "But it gets rid of some of the real negatives that Second Life has."SceneCaster, which will launch later today, was on our radar, but we didn't really know enough about it to include it on our list. This morning I got a chance to check it out, and after playing with it for the past hour I don't think it really is aimed at Second Life. SceneCaster is about creating 3D, virtual spaces, but it's not a virtual world.In fact, SceneCaster actually says flat out in their FAQ that they aren't a virtual world like Second Life:Is SceneCaster a virtual world?No. SceneCaster contains fragments of virtual world like spaces but purposely avoids the complexity of virtual world experiences. SceneCaster is designed as an accessible form of immersive 3D media. Unlike in Second...

NPR Launches Nice Mobile Site
US public broadcaster National Public Radio has released a new mobile site that allows listeners to stream local, national and international radio pieces over their mobile phones. Available at m.npr.org, I used this service throughout the weekend and am very impressed. It's simple, powerful and it works.NPR worked with mobile site developers Crisp to enable handset detection on their mobile site - visitors are able to stream segments through whatever audio software they have on their phones or by calling a dedicated phone number for each story. A general phone number also offers an IVR menu to select stories by voice. All in all, it's the kind of inclusive service you'd hope NPR would offer. The content is fresh, the audio quality acceptable, the experience good.Also unsurprising, there's no ability to comment on the stories. There could be, but like too many other large organizations NPR would rather broadcast to you, give you new options to spread their content through...

Amazon MP3 Launches DRM-Free Music Store
Amazon's long awaited DRM-free online music store launched today. The service is called Amazon MP3 (my goodness what an awful URL!). There's an estimated 2 million MP3 files there, for the low price of 89 or 99 cents each. I tried it out and am happy to report that there were four CocoRosie albums available for sale there - the desktop downloader worked well on my MacBook (see image below), the shopping experience was very simple and I'm looking forward to transferring the songs over to my other computer.This is definitely a service I'll use when I want to buy whole albums and can't make it down to the local, independent record store. I've always felt dirty buying music from iTunes, now I think I'll feel a little less dirty buying DRM free music from Amazon. See a longer, more in-depth review of the new service forthcoming over at our digital lifestyle blog Last100.

Microsoft's Halo 3 Strategy - Beyond Gaming
Read/WriteWeb network blog Last100, has an interesting piece out this morning about Microsoft's launch of the latest game in its popular Halo series. Last100 writes that Halo 3 has two features that push the game into new territory beyond video gaming and break new ground.One of those features is a sophisticated demo recording system that saves gameplay movies with game data, allowing them to be shared and remixed, in essence allowing the creation of gameplay mashups. The second feature is a file sharing service launched by Bungie -- the game studio responsible for the Halo series -- allowing users to share screenshots, game films, and custom game objects with other gamers."Interestingly, Saved Films are not video files but instead contain the actual game data. This enables users to replay the game at any resolution, and to change things like camera angles. Saved Films might seem like a minor feature at first, but I think its really important for two reasons. Number one, it...