last.fm has been redesigned: check it out!

Spotted this nice wiki host on Rubel’s del.icio.us feed.

Spotback is a new AJAX-powered, which provides the reader with personalised stories, grabbed from news sources and blogs, based on their ratings of other stories!

The site allows you to remove categories from your view. So if you don’t wish to read articles about parenting or education, you simply click Remove. it also allows you to chosse from sub-categories, for example under Computers and Internet, I could choose to read about Web 2.0, Web Dev, Geek Talk or various other things.

After you read an article, you use a slider to rate it (and it then saves using Ajax). Personally, I prefer sliders over stars, as they seem more original. Using your ratings and the ratings of other users, it predicts stories you’ll like and displays them. You then get the option to see other people who liked the article, and then view what other articles they liked. You can even rate the user!

Spotback allows you to view the entire body of a post if you click ‘More…’. I’m not sure if this is legal under all right’s reserved copyrights, as I doubt it would qualify as fair use. However, I severely doubt any bloggers complaining, as they are credited which gives them hits back. Also, Spotback allows people to comment on articles, though this feature isn’t widely used. Also, you can save (publicly and privately) your favourite articles.

Spotback also provides 4 widgets you can add to the sidebar. Hot Videos, which grabs videos off MetaCafe (though amazingly displays them on-site); a Search widget which allows you to search Spotback, Google, MSN and Yahoo!; an RSS reader widget, which does what it says on the tin; and also a categories widget which simply displays categories.

Spotback uses AJAX at every opportunity, but goes over the top with features. The fact it’s a personalised news site is amazing, and you don’t need to chuck widgets and such on top of that!

Digg!

Tags: web2.0, web 2, web2, web 2.0, news, web, internet, ajax, semantic web

Nice Flash mockup of Star Trekkin’ by the firm. Love The Flintstones’ references.

Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 has been not so quitely released. Quite a lot of changes, though I don’t think it warrants such a big version number shift.