goat-choker (n.) An article of inordinate and suffocating length, produced to gratify the vanity of the author and the aspirations of the publication. (John McIntyre)

I regularly write articles that, by Web standards, are obscenely long. My November article on ShopWell was 6,500 words long, and my series last week on Google’s mobile ambitions ran to almost 7,000 words. Granted, it was broken up into three parts, but the longest section was still 2,600 words, or five Xconomy pages. Which is about five times the length of your average piece in TechCrunch, Mashable, VentureBeat, and the other popular tech blogs.

I wrote 7,000 words about Google because that’s how much space the material demanded. But sometimes I feel like a hypocrite, because the truth is that I don’t like to read long posts on the Web. If I come across an important article that’s more than two pages long (about 1,000 words), I click my browser’s Read Later button. That sends the piece off to Instapaper, a free Web service that reformats text for easy reading on an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or Kindle e-reader.

For me, Instapaper is a real lifesaver. I love curling up with my iPad or Kindle and reading for hours. An article might look like a goat-choker on a Web page—but when it’s shorn of all the distractions of the desktop and the Web and presented on one of Instapaper’s nice, white, folio-style pages, it becomes easily digestible.

But that begs the question: why am I still writing long pieces for the Web? I don’t have the excuse that I used to have, when I worked for magazines like Science and Technology Review—i.e., that my pieces were just the digital reflections of works originally prepared for print.

I guess I’m going on faith. The faith that at least a few readers will be interested enough to click “next page” all the way to the end of a five-page article. Our data shows that there are such people, though not as many as I’d really like. The glass-half-full view is that at least some of my readers are fanatically loyal, sticking with me all the way to the end. The Google article is pretty heavy going, and it seems ungrateful to wish that more people were this attentive.

Then there’s the glass-half-empty view—the one that says it’s futile to make such high demands on readers when there’s such a big supply of short, snackable content just a click or two away. A print magazine on a newsstand might be competing with a few hundred other magazines, at worst, for the prospective buyer’s attention. Blogs must contend with the entire Web, where there are well over a trillion unique URLs, and where short-form content rules. (There’s a reason the average YouTube video is under three minutes long.) On top of all that, I can verify from my own experience that—as The New York Review of Books put it in a 2009 essay—”readers themselves seem allergic to reading extended pieces on computer screens.”

So we have a huge point of friction: The Web is the most flexible, immediate, and pervasive medium ever invented for spreading the written word. By extension, it ought to be a great medium for long-form writing. Yet it’s often a headache, literally, to consume those words on the screen of a personal computer. So people don’t.

Maybe what’s needed to reduce the friction and rejuvenate long-form journalism online is a more flexible way to send written information across the last one or two feet—or, as Web geeks might put it, a way to decouple the network layer from the presentation layer. I’m encouraged here by news that Dave Winer, the RSS and podcasting pioneer, is working on … Next Page »

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While nearly everything about the Web has changed since its emergence circa 1993—who’s using it, what types of content are available, how Web pages are constructed, how it’s all paid for—the desktop browser hasn’t. It’s still basically a big blank square that lets you navigate between Web pages, with a set of buttons and controls around the edges.

That’s not to say that browsers don’t evolve. Every few years some team of engineers comes out with a new one designed to address the perceived shortcomings of its predecessors. Thus we got entrants like Opera 4.0 in 2000 (a response to the need for browsers on non-PC platforms like mobile phones), Firefox in 2004 (a reaction to feature creep in Netscape’s Mozilla browser), Flock in 2005 (a reaction to the lack of social features in Firefox), and Chrome in 2008 (Google’s answer to the other browsers’ alleged performance and security problems). But the basic concept has remained the same: browser as vessel, designed to deliver Web pages and then stay out of the way.

Now there’s another new browser in town: RockMelt. The premise, this time, is that older browsers haven’t caught up to the new ways people are using the Web—in particular, the way they’re spending more time interacting with each other via social platforms like Facebook, and getting more of their information pushed to them in small chunks via channels like Twitter and RSS. Built for Mac and Windows computers by a venture-funded startup in Mountain View, CA, RockMelt was released to the public on Monday in limited beta form after two years of stealth-mode development. After using RockMelt as my default browser all week, I feel qualified to say that it represents the biggest departure yet from the old pattern of the Web browser as a big blank vessel. That’s a good thing—the browser concept needed some further shaking up, and after all, it was to encourage precisely this kind of innovation that organizations like Mozilla, Google, and Apple open-sourced parts of their browser code bases. (RockMelt is built atop Google’s Chromium and Apple’s Webkit.)

But while I like RockMelt—and will probably stick with it (sorry, Chrome)—I’m not persuaded that it fully delivers on the startup’s promise to build a browser “designed around you and how you use the Web.” That’s because how we use the Web is changing even faster than browser makers can keep up, and has less and less to do with the PC desktop and more to do with mobility and information appliances like smartphones, tablets, and Internet-connected TVs. Don’t get me wrong—I’m awed by all the work that’s gone into RockMelt. But I worry that the issue the startup chose to tackle is already out of date.

To put it another way: RockMelt doesn’t solve the problem that needs solving the most right now, which, to my mind, is the inconsistent way we experience the Web when we access it from different types of devices. The truth is that today’s mobile computing gadgets, and the plethora of apps available for them, are finally making it possible to spend less time sitting at your desktop PC, while still getting most of the benefits of the Web and social media. But RockMelt’s product is still solidly PC-centric. The startup’s implicit pitch is that your desktop browser should be both your main news-gathering conduit and your social media control center. Now that the Web is everywhere, though, I want to be able to switch fluidly between information devices depending on what I’m doing, and what I really need are tools that make that easier, lessening the sense of cognitive dissonance every time I close the lid on my MacBook and switch on my iPad or my Kindle or my Roku Player. RockMelt isn’t that, yet.

What is RockMelt? Before I get back to my lofty criticisms, let me spend a few paragraphs explaining what’s so interesting about the new browser. Mainly, it’s the elegant way RockMelt integrates with an individual user’s Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feeds. Once you’re signed in—RockMelt may be the first case where you have to log in to the browser itself, in addition to the Web services or communities you visit—it provides a continuous yet unobtrusive picture of … Next Page »

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Wetpaint has long been considered one of the Northwest’s top young tech startups. The Seattle-based company, founded in 2005, has raised $40 million from venture capitalists, including one who backed Facebook. Wetpaint has been heralded by Jude O’Reilley (then at online-health startup Trusera, now at Amazon) as “stars in the consumer wiki space,” and a “power to the people.” But the star of wiki is now building on that success in a new and fascinating way, aiming to become a star of online entertainment media.

Wetpaint’s scalable Web-publishing content platform boasts over 1.3 million user-built sites, and gets 10 million unique pageviews a month. The hope is that user base will give Wetpaint a running start with its latest venture, Wetpaint Entertainment, today, in which it is diving into the entertainment media space face-first. The idea, co-founder and chief executive Ben Elowitz says, is to turn the traditional publishing industry on its ear.

“Publishing is going through a massive transformation right now, and it really needs to find a new model—the audience has become so fragmented, so we really need to find a model,” he says. “Our goal is to revolutionize media by cracking the code on a profitable, scalable model for the publishing industry.”

At first glance, Wetpaint Entertainment sounds like a glorified network of TV fan sites—in the same vein as the sites driven by another Seattle-based startup, BuddyTV and the thousands of independent blogs and entertainment news sites. In fact, the creation is something very different. Wetpaint Entertainment’s 15 ‘channel’ sites, each dedicated to a different popular TV show, are the product of the intersection of multimedia videos and images, active social networks, and a team of professional editorial staff. It’s sort of a cross between social wiki technology, a Web-analytics company, and a magazine.

“We started with the social wiki by Wetpaint platform, and as we did that we realized that there was a big opportunity around entertainment,” Elowitz says.

The result, he says, are topical sites chock full of content specifically tailored for the reader—or user, rather. It’s supposed to maximize the resources of the web, and integrating new technologies, to create a more efficient, comprehensive, and more interactive and content-rich site at a fraction of the cost of other mainstream media outlets, like People magazine or US Weekly.

Wetpaint homepage

“If we were People magazine trying to do this, it would take hundreds of people,” Elowitz says. “We are able to publish content at about a fifth of the cost, because we’re using technology to be more efficient.”

Much of the technology he’s referring to stems from Wetpaint’s original Web-based tool for creating wikis that were both easy to use, and powered with social networking tools. By developing a publishing platform heavily mired in technology, Elowitz says his team of 35-full time staff (the company laid off 15 employees in July 2009) has found a more interactive, faster, customizable, and more advertiser-primed way of publishing.

“One of the themes that we’re attacking in entertainment, is there’s this bridge between Hollywood and the real life, and we’re able to cross that bridge,” he says. “Traditionally, top publishers have had a really high consumer experience, but at a really high cost, and that cost isn’t sustainable.”

Wetpaint Entertianment is launching today with 15 sites centered around TV shows that are popular with young women: “The Vampire Diaries,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “America’s Next Top Model,” “Castle,” “Hellcats,” “Nikita,” “Glee,” “Dancing With The Stars,” “Top Chef,” “Pretty Little Liar,” “Bachelorette,” “The Bachelor,” “Gossip Girl,” “Jersey Shore” and “The Real Housewives of DC.” On each site there are as many as 200 updates daily on topics surrounding each fan base—show news, spoilers, gossip, fashion worn by the stars (an easy in for high-end advertisers, Elowitz notes), top 10 lists, music from the show, and pictures and video both aggregated from syndication partners—which he could not name—and created in-house.

“We have original video productions where we recap a week in TV, or take people off the street and re-enact scenes from episodes,” Elowitz says.” This is all really about completing that … Next Page »

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[Updated, see page 2] Say a reviewer goes to a performance of the latest Broadway extravaganza, and the elaborate stage machinery breaks down before the show even starts, forcing everyone to go home. This actually happened to me once, at a showing of Sunset Boulevard in New York. It probably wouldn’t be fair for the reviewer to write his piece based on this disastrous non-performance.

I’m in an analogous situation with Flipboard, the Palo Alto, CA, startup that released an ambitious “social magazine” app for the Apple iPad this week and was almost immediately overwhelmed by technical problems. But I’m going to go ahead and write my review anyway. I’ll tell you why. On a tactical level, there are some interesting lessons for other startups in the way Flipboard has handled, or rather mishandled, the app’s launch. But more importantly, even the crippled version of the Flipboard app that I’ve been testing is pretty cool. It begins to deliver on some of the enormous, but still largely untapped, potential that many people see in the iPad.

Once Flipboard has overcome its launch-week fiasco, its software could earn a place as one of the gadget’s killer apps. Several of these are likely to emerge over the next year as developers continue to test-drive the device and figure out amazing, wholly surprising new applications for it. That’s sure to drive sales of iPads well pass the current 3.2 million mark, and could boost demand for competing tablet devices as well.

What is Flipboard designed to do? You can get a good introduction from the company’s marketing video, and from accounts from bloggers such as Robert Scoble and Kara Swisher who were given exclusive previews of the app. (It was partly their rave reviews that touched off the avalanche of signups Wednesday, overwhelming Flipboard’s servers and forcing the company to put in place an invitation system to throttle down the rate at which the app accepts new users.)

In essence, you can think of Flipboard as a wastewater treatment plant for your social-media accounts. It sucks up the flotsam-filled stream of information confronting heavy users of Twitter, Facebook, and the Web. Then, by exploiting some valuable old principles of print magazine design, it re-emits the material in a form that makes browsing all those updates far more appetizing.

Once you’ve given Flipboard your Twitter and Facebook credentials, the app pulls in tweets and status updates from everyone you follow. Which is exactly what popular apps like Tweetdeck or Seesmic do. But then Flipboard goes several steps further. To start, it arranges your incoming updates on the iPad screen in an attractive magazine-like format, with the tweets or updates themselves presented as headlines. If the tweets or updates contain links to Web pages, images, or videos, the app automatically downloads excerpts from those materials as well, and appends them to the headlines as if they were article text and illustrations. To scan backward in time, you simply flip from page to page of these “articles” with a swiping motion.

When you touch one of the “articles” to open it, you can see a bit more of the original text from the linked source. Exactly how much text appears depends on the policies of the original publisher, according to Flipboard CEO and co-founder Mike McCue. If you want to explore further and surf to the original source, Flipboard will open an in-app Web browser and take you there. You can also … Next Page »

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Punit Shah used to think that there was no good reason that JARVIS, the artificial intelligence personal assistant to the Iron Man comic series protagonist Tony Stark, shouldn’t exist in real life.

It’s an idea that he brought with him to Boston’s Startup Weekend in December, an event where aspiring entrepreneurs team up for 54 hours of translating their ideas to reality. There, Shah joined forces with fellow Northeastern University students Marc Held and Aaron Gerry.

Together, the team developed a prototype for the mobile app that they call the “smartest damn alarm clock,” which wakes up its users with information that’s most helpful for getting their days started, such as weather, news headlines, upcoming appointments, and e-mails, much the same way Stark’s JARVIS delivers the superhero the details he needs for his day. (Or so the Zazu guys say—in the interest of full disclosure, I haven’t actually seen the Iron Man movies.) Shah, Gerry, and Held won third place at Startup Weekend, and early this year incorporated under the name Zazu, inspired by the bird personal assistant character in Disney’s Lion King movie.

Now, they’re putting together a private beta version of the app that’s due for release in June. Initially the Zazu app will be available on phones running Google’s Android operating system, a platform the company chose because it allows you to run beta testing before hitting the marketplace for sale, but they ultimately hope to expand to other platforms such as Apple’s iPad and iPhone. The goal is to get the product to market later this summer.

Zazu’s app works by first scanning the Web for information that users designate as relevant to them, and delivers that to the users’ mobile phones. It uses third party text-to-voice technology to translate that information into the sound that wakes the users up for whenever they have set their alarm clocks. A typical user might wake up to something like; “Good morning Bob. The weather in Boston is 65 degrees, with a chance of rain,” followed by a headline and lead sentence of a news story from a source of his choosing.

“Being able to hear it audibly is a great, engaging way to get up and know what you need to do to start the day,” says Shah, who has the role of CEO at Zazu.

With this first release, Zazu is starting with more elementary features, such as weather, and headlines from a list of pre-selected RSS feeds that users can choose from. For those who don’t have a smart phone, it’s also implementing a service that calls users’ phones automatically with the same information.

With later releases of its app, Zazu looking to tap into other information such as users’ e-mail and Twitter accounts, and personal calendars, to better engage them with starting their days. It will also let them specify the RSS feeds they’d most like to be woken up to, rather than … Next Page »

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My favorite limerick of all time came printed on the bottom of a coffee cup:

All hail the goddess Caffeina!
She hangs out by the coffee machina.
We’re all on the run
But we get more work done
Since coffee came onto the scena!

Yes, this anonymous ditty breaks the rules of limericks, principally by mangling the meter and using made-up words like “machina” and “scena.” But it’s the sentiment that appeals to me. I do get more work done because of coffee. If the sprightly elixir was good for Voltaire, who is said to have consumed 50 cups a day, I figure it must be good for me.

I also get more work done because of e-mail. And because of the Web, and RSS feeds, and Google, and Twitter, and my iPhone and my MacBook and my Kindle—all of the tools, in short, that are melting our brains and impoverishing our communications, according to a circle of naysayers who have been very busy lately publishing books and articles with titles like Digital Barbarism and The Cult of the Amateur and “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Technology criticism is an invaluable strain in our culture that stretches back to such brilliant writers as Lewis Mumford, Rachel Carson, Marshall McLuhan, and Jane Jacobs. But to tell the truth, I don’t give much more credence to the recent anti-digital jeremiads than I do to the periodic warnings—always swiftly overturned by medical authorities—that caffeine is bad for your health.

The latest addition to the curmudgeon’s club is John Freeman, the acting editor of the UK-based literary quarterly Granta, who published a so-called “manifesto for slow communication” in the August 21 Wall Street Journal. The essay, which was adapted from Freeman’s forthcoming book The Tyrrany of E-Mail, argues that living in such close and constant proximity to our e-mail inboxes stresses us out, cuts us off from the physical world, and undermines our communication skills. Freeman thinks that spending all day writing and answering e-mail amounts to “simulated busyness” rather than genuine productivity. And he believes that the only way to restore sanity is to “step off this hurtling machine,” jabber less, and think more. “We need to learn to use [e-mail] far more sparingly, with far less dependency, if we are to gain control of our lives,” Freeman writes.

There are certainly days when I’d love to ignore my e-mail. Thursdays, for example, when I’m supposed to be writing this column. As Freeman rightly notes, “We need time to shape and design and filter our words so that we say exactly what we mean,” and it would be wonderful, on those days, to have a few uninterrupted hours to take his advice. But I know that closing the e-mail tab in my browser would be as unwise as … Next Page »

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Sometimes we’re so busy doing new stuff here at Xconomy that we don’t have time to actually let you know about it. So here’s a handy list of things that have been happening at the company this summer that you might have missed.

—We published our first premium product, Startup School: The Xconomy Guide to Venture Incubators. Here on the site, there’s a free list of the 19 programs we canvassed where early-stage startups can obtain mentoring and seed funding. For $45 (going up to $60 on September 1), you can buy the full report, which contains details about the programs’ application deadlines and procedures, stipend and equity policies, notable graduates, and more.

—With help from Providence, RI-based Mofuse, we launched a mobile version of Xconomy at http://m.xconomy.com. It contains all the same great content as the full Xconomy site, but in a format that’s quick to load and easy to read on mobile devices.

—The first Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepeneurship drew a standing-room-only crowd on June 24. Ryan wrote a nice summary and Bob gave props to everyone who helped.

—We moved our Cambridge headquarters from a funky but tiny former dentist’s office at 10 Rogers Street to a funky and gigantic space in the venerable Foundry Works building at 101 Rogers Street.

—Our first Seattle Battle of the Tech Bands, co-hosted with the Washington Technology Industry Association, was a huge smash on July 30, garnering great reviews from The Seattle Times, TechFlash, and nPost. The winning bands: Indigo Soul (Audience Favorite) and Lions Ambition (Most Innovative).

—As always, we offer many ways to access Xconomy. You can sign up for e-mail newsletters, including newsletters pertaining specifically to subject areas like information technology or life sciences, or to news from Xconomy’s home cities of Boston, San Diego, and Seattle. Ditto for our RSS feeds.

—We’re very active on Twitter. Staffers tweet about a variety of Xconomy stories at @Xconomy. And several of us tweet regularly from our personal accounts: You can follow Bob at @bbuderi, Luke at @ldtimmerman, Ryan at @Ryan_McBride, and me at @wroush.

—If you want to distribute the full text of an Xconomy article to clients, customers, or colleagues, it’s easier than ever to buy a reprint.

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What the Sam Hill (as my grandpa used to say) is a Daily Grommet? The answer comes in two parts. “Grommet” is the word industrial designer and entrepreneur Jules Pieri has appropriated for the kind of bewitching product that you might discover in an upscale shop in Puerto Vallarta or Tuscany or Vermont—something that’s so unique or beautiful or inventive that you just have to buy one and tell all your friends about it.

And the Daily Grommet is an e-commerce startup in Lexington, MA, that features one new grommet on its website every weekday. Through videos and short articles, Daily Grommet staffers—often Pieri herself—explain what’s so cool about the products they’ve chosen and the companies that make them. They also sell the products, on consignment from their makers. This week’s finds, for example, include an energy bar with ingredients picked by customers, a solar-powered flashlight (no, that’s not a contradiction in terms), and a garlic shredder that looks a little like a little two-wheeled Popemobile.

If you’re thinking that the Daily Grommet sounds like Hammacher Schlemmer meets RocketBoom meets VeryShortList, maybe with a dash of Martha Stewart, you’re not completely wrong. But there’s something stylish, original, and earnest about Pieri’s business that isn’t captured by any of these comparisons.

For one thing, as I can relate after visiting the startup’s office/studio in a quaint clapboard house just off Lexington’s main drag last week, the women who run the company (and they’re all women) are, like Pieri herself, genuinely nice people. They have a visible passion for uncovering little-known new products, testing and investigating them, and telling their stories to the world.

Left to right: Joanne Domeniconi, Jules Pieri, Jen Lockwood, Barbara Gordon, Patti Purcell, Wendy Chandor.

For another, the Daily Grommet has a common-sense business model that blends old-fashioned retailing with the best of Web 2.0-style interactivity. In addition to the daily videos, which are an easily digested two to three minutes in length, the startup is utilizing the full complement of social media channels, including a Twitter stream, an RSS feed, an e-mail newsletter, a Facebook page, and badges and widgets that fans can embed in their own websites. And every grommet gets its own permanent page on the site where readers can leave comments and even interact with the people who make the products. (The company often singles out companies that are so small or new that a feature on the Daily Grommet can be their first big break.)

It all amounts to a human-centered, high-touch approach that might just help to redefine what consumers expect from e-commerce sites. Whether such a business can be scaled up efficiently is an open question. But clearly, if you had the courage in this age of cloud-based software startups to start from scratch with a business that sells actual stuff, you’d want to take advantage of the media that people are using today for word-of-mouth exchanges, namely Twitter, blogs, online video, and the like.

And ideally, you wouldn’t just dilute these media with empty marketing messages, but you’d tell real stories about the people who make the stuff and what motivated them.

This is the kind of stuff Pieri thinks about. “Social media is not commerce media,” she says. “What travels in social media is news—whether it’s personal or national or just funny videos. I know that the stories around products have that same power, and the potential that people would want to … Next Page »

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Back in December 2008 we wrote about the launch of Everypoint, a Boston startup working on a platform that makes it easy for developers to write cool iPhone-like applications for Java-capable phones, which includes most feature phones (i.e. non-smartphones) these days. To seed developer efforts, Everypoint started out by releasing a few of its own apps for its so-called Nemo platform, including a stock ticker and a few basic games. Today Everypoint released its most sophisticated Nemo app yet, a news reader program, and said that the number of third-party developers writing applications for Nemo is “exploding.”

The news reader, which is designed conserve battery life and bandwidth, allows feature-phone owners to access any feed in a standard format such as RSS or XML (see screen shots below). It also supports “push” notification, meaning updates supplied automatically by a server rather than requested by the user. As with all of the mobile applications built by Everypoint, the source code for the news reader is available free to Nemo developers, who can adapt it or incorporate it into their own applications. Applications developed on the platform then get wrapped back into the catalog distributed with the Nemo software.

The size of Everypoint’s Nemo Preview Beta developer program has tripled in the last two months, according to Allan Mackinnon, Everypoint’s founder, president, and chief technology officer. “We’re excited by this momentum and we look forward to working closely with the mobile application development community to unlock the advanced capabilities of feature phones that consumers already own,” Mackinnon said in a statement released today.

One of the companies participating in the program is Pongr, a Boston startup with server-based image-recognition systems that help people with camera phones get price comparisons for items they find in stores. Pongr has applications that run on the Apple iPhone, Blackberry phones, and Android phones, and it’s using Nemo to create a version that will run on Java-enabled phones. “We are excited about the opportunity to make Pongr available to an even larger audience of mobile users than currently available with other application stores,” Jamie Thompson, Pongr’s CEO and co-founder, said in Everypoint’s statement.

Thompson will be on hand to demonstrate Pongr at tomorrow’s Xconomy Forum on the Future of Mobile Innovation in New England. And both Everypoint and Pongr are participants in the Xconomy Mobile Showcase, an online supplement to the event.

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Values of n, a collaborative-software startup in Portland, OR, has been acquired by San Francisco-based Twitter for an undisclosed amount. The startup’s existing products will be shut down on December 8, but “the technology behind the scenes will live on and potentially re-emerge as part of Twitter’s systems, services, user experience, or open source libraries,” according to a blog post by Twitter CEO Ev Williams yesterday evening.

From all appearances, this was a talent grab. Twitter has hired Values of n’s founder, Rael Dornfest, an engineer and author who did early work on RSS Web feed technologies and served as chief technology officer at O’Reilly Media. Dornfest joins Twitter as the newest member of its engineering team, according to Williams. “A short while ago it became clear to Rael that while the innovative personal productivity and information management applications his startup had created were useful products with a loyal following, Values of n was not going to meet its huge expectations as a standalone business,” Williams writes.

Dornfest notes on his own blog that the Twitter courtship has been ongoing. “I started consulting there a few months ago, and fell in love with the team, their way of thinking about things, and of course the product,” he writes. “It turns out we worked incredibly well together, the feeling was mutual, and they pulled me in as a permanent member of the team.”

Twitter, the micro-messaging company that recently turned down a $500 million stock acquisition offer from Facebook, gets the assets and intellectual property of Values of n, including its smart sticky-note software and its personal-assistant application that works over e-mail, texting, and the Web. In 2006, Values of n raised at least $500,000 from First Round Capital, Magnus Ventures, and Sherpalo Ventures, according to Northwest Innovation.

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Ahh, Boston in springtime. Duck boat armadas on the Charles. The vinegary smell of the wood-chip mulch landscapers spread everywhere. Tow trucks hauling away cars so that street sweepers can get at the dead leaves accumulating since October. A guy on a recumbent bike pulling a train of three skateboarders along the Esplanade.

I could have spent the rest of this 70-degree afternoon watching the city come back to life from my park bench. But out of commitment to you, dear reader, I’ve wandered back inside to write my first annual spring roundup of new and/or improved tools for finding and tracking information on the Web. If you’d rather be outside yourself, just bookmark this article using Diigo (of which more below) and come back to it when the temps dip back below 40—which will probably be this weekend, knowing New England.

The advent of the RSS syndication format has made it so easy to grab and repurpose chunks of information from around the Web that there’s a sudden surfeit of websites that aggregate content from other sites. But not all of these aggregators are equal, and I thought I would share a few of my favorites.

For convenience, versatility, and beauty, it’s hard to beat Netvibes, which somehow manages to array 100 or more RSS headlines across a single page without looking cluttered. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now, and have always been impressed by how easily I can add feeds to my Netvibes page and organize them across multiple tabs. And with the launch of Netvibes’ Ginger release about a month ago, the site is even more powerful than before, acting as a platform for sharing and republishing your favorite finds. While it’s still best at aggregating RSS feeds and podcasts, Netvibes can also be used as a gateway to your e-mail, social-networking, and photo-sharing accounts; communications tools such as Twitter, Skype, and instant-messaging programs; and hundreds of widgets that bring you everything from weather reports to TV schedules.

If Netvibes is all about customization, Alltop is all about simplicity. Launched last month by prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki, Alltop is a clean and spartan collection of the five most recent headlines from 50 to 100 leading blogs in each of 55 categories, from books to extreme sports to Linux. If you mouse over one of the headlines, the first few sentences of the story pop up in a bubble (Netvibes does this too, but Alltop’s snippets are longer, which I appreciate). As far as I can tell, Guy himself determines which blogs are worthy of inclusion in Alltop, but I’m impressed by his editorial taste so far. (Full disclosure: Xconomy is one of the top blogs listed in Alltop’s Venture Capital category.)

Many software geeks protested after Alltop’s launch that there was little new technology under the hood, beyond the site’s sleek transparent banner. I think that’s exactly the point. It’s so simple that you can learn how to use it in seconds, and you never have to fool with adding an RSS feed manually (a concept still entirely foreign to most Internet users).

I think there’s always room for Web developers to try out new variations of established products such as RSS aggregators. That’s exactly what the brand-new site Naubo is doing in the area of news spidering, a genre pioneered years ago by Google News. Naubo is, in fact, a virtual copy of Google News, right down to the way its columns are laid out and color-coded—except that it’s all about technology. I’m really enjoying the way Naubo surfaces the latest key stories in the world of software, hardware, and the Internet from both the blogosphere and traditional news sources like Reuters and Computerworld. In principle you could personalize Google News to emphasize certain subjects, but it has only one category for Sci-Tech, whereas Naubo has more than a half-dozen, including sections devoted specifically to Apple, Microsoft, and Linux.

Sometimes, the aggregators lead you to articles or sites that you want to save and remember. And for that, I have another favorite tool: Diigo. While it would be easy to describe Diigo as a social bookmarking service, that would make it sound too much like Del.icio.us or Furl or Reddit (all of which I’ve tried and tired of at various times). It’s really more of a research tool with social, collaborative features.

Most importantly, Diigo (which is operated through a toolbar that works in the Firefox, Internet Explorer and Flock browsers) allows you to bookmark pages on a list that’s saved forever online and accessible from anywhere. No more messing around with your Web browser’s built-in bookmarks, which won’t be available to you if you happen to log into the web from a different computer. Just as fun, Diigo makes it easy to highlight passages within a Web page—so you can return later and see what it was that caught your attention—and even attach floating “sticky notes.”

You can also attach tags to your bookmarks to make them easier to find later on, and you can click on individual tags to see what other Diigo users are bookmarking publicly under those tags. (As a journalist, I’m secretive enough about what I’m researching online that I tend to keep my Diigo bookmarks private.) In late March, Diigo rolled out Version 3 of its system, which includes enhanced “social browsing” features such as the ability to see how other people have annotated a given Web page, follow what your friends are bookmarking, or subscribe to other users’ bookmarks based on tags. These are nice additions, but I’ve always appreciated Diigo mainly for its simple, reliable bookmarking and highlighting tools; I’ve got close to 700 bookmarks on the site going back to early 2006.

Recently I’ve been experimenting with another new collaborative Web information-sharing tool called Twine, which is still in beta testing and is built around small communities of people following specific subjects or “twines” such as virtual worlds and semantic Web apps. I haven’t used it enough yet to be able to tell whether it’s a sound concept, but I’ll let you know in a future column. Meanwhile, if you like trying out new Web 2.0 applications as much as I do, CNET’s Webware blog, edited by Rafe Needleman, highlights several new ones every day. But before you go there—go outside! Unless, of course, spring has gone back into hiding by the time you read this.

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