Webware

Last.fm has released its list of the top 10 albums, artists, and tracks for 2008 based on number of listeners. Coldplay was the big winner this year, taking the top spot for album of the year. It also had a whopping six tracks (including the top two) featured in the year's top tracks listing. MGMT was the most popular artist of 2008.

Popular social service Friendfeed announced Monday that it has gone global with support for six more languages aside from English. The service now accommodates those who speak French, German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and simplified Chinese.

The Digiteen Dream Team, a group of ninth graders who use Google's Lively for school projects, announced that they will be holding a protest Wednesday against Google's decision to close down Lively at the end of 2008. The students have formed a Lively protest room where others can join and show their support for the students' cause.

Slideshare, a company that offers users a way to upload, share, and embed presentations, announced that it will finally allow its users to upload Apple's Keynote files to the service. Slideshare also supports Office, OpenOffice, and Google Docs files.

Indie music store eMusic announced Friday that its service now boasts a recommendation engine powered by Mediaunbound. The site shows users a "Music You'll Love" pane to help them find songs that are similar to those they already enjoy, as well as a "Best Sellers" listing provided by the company's editorial staff.

My final Under the Radar session today focuses on tools for business collaboration. In the past year, Webware.com has covered each of these four applications, but now they're each back with something new to bring to the virtual table.

Blist, an easy, engaging online database, will be releasing a premium version for small and midsized businesses. The easy, rich database environment can be used for business needs such as data storage and applicant-tracking, and features 3D graphs, drag-and-drop query-building, and document storage inside a database.

Next week Blist will add the capability to use others' data structures as a template for your next "blist." In addition to monetizing for the enterprise crowd, Blist will start placing ads on the free version.

Cozimo is a video and image collaborative annotation tool (see coverage). It shares a few similarities with FeedbackFX with much more attention on real-time collaboration of rich media documents. Each member in a work group is assigned a layer where they draw and scribble comments, all of which are saved in the session even as it's synchronously presented to the group. Cozimo can also be used asynchronously through a collaboration widget that can be pasted onto any image on any Web site. Like other collaboration tools, there's internal IM, though VoIP services aren't yet part of the equation.

LiquidPlanner's collaborative project management software doesn't gauge your project's progress by how on-target you are; it measures its deficiencies (coverage). LiquidPlanner can calculate schedules and predict using mathematical probability when a project is likely to get done. It also cooks up a range of best and worst case scenarios to project the soonest you'll conclude assuming everything goes right, and how long you'll struggle if everything goes wrong.

LiquidPlanner calculates project management estimates.

SlideShare (coverage) is a site for uploading and sharing PowerPoint, PDFs, and OpenOffice presentations and also folds in some social networking elements like blogging and podcast hosting. CEO Rashmi Sinha said she sees her company traveling more along the LinkedIn model for generating contacts than a YouTube for all sorts of PowerPoint presentations. E-learning and business presentations make up the bulk of the content, but there's also a fair number of photo slide shows and even some more adult content. There's also a Facebook application for easy uploading.

Going forward, SlideShare will introduce a program for lead generation a la LinkedIn. They're also talking about ad deals to monetize the free service and will work on integrating Google Presently documents.

The bookmarking and reference service I use most is adding a show-and-tell slideshow feature. Diigo lets you mark up Web pages, then share and export your notes. Its new WebSlides, in closed beta testing, will enable you to create narrated presentations of Web pages that you've saved and annotated.

Diigo is meant to be more practical than something like StumbleUpon, a fun way to discover new sites. Diigo Vice President Maggie Tsai touted Diigo WebSlides at the Office 2.0 conference today as an ideal tool for teachers. Her demo showed off handy-looking recording and playback controls for making presentations out of your saved pages and then sharing them with groups of other users. The slide shows also display text you've highlighted or notes you've taken on bookmarked sites. Unfortunately, you can't test WebSlides yet; only a beta wait list sign-up is available for now.

I use Diigo instead of Delicious because it has more research-friendly features, and it can simultaneously save stuff to Delicious, Newsvine, and other services. Diigo's toolbar and pop-ups could be easier to use, and I wish it could annotate PDFs. Still, I'm hoping that more changes will continue to come along as the beta service matures.

SlideShare, which lets you share PowerPoint presentations with the world, today added the capability to match audio tracks to slide shows. This is a cool feature that podcasters could exploit to show and tell a story at the same time. Professors, marketers, and other storytellers might give this free tool a whirl to provide remote access to their work instead of using software such as Adobe Captivate or TechSmith Camtasia. You could even use Slideshare to narrate a PowerPoint-based photo gallery of your vacation. Come to think of it, why don't more photo-sharing sites follow Zooomr's lead (more here) by letting you add narration to pictures?

SlideShare makes embedding a file from PowerPoint or Keynote into any blog or Web page cut-and-paste painless. The site attracted more than 3 million unique visits last month, with slides in more than 11 languages. Who knew cruising through PowerPoint files could be fun? You can find slide shows on nearly any subject; popular topic tags include "Web 2.0" and "humor." The site's social networking lets you interact alone or in groups, tagging and commenting on each others' presentations. SlideShare will add privacy options later.

To use the new feature, just upload a PowerPoint to Slideshare, then upload an MP3 file to the Internet Archive or elsewhere. Next, Slideshare's Create Slidecast feature will sync the sound with the slides. You can match chunks of a speech or song to precise slides, or create a freeflowing soundtrack instead.

If you're trying to mimic some experimental Andy Warhol film, you could create a dizzying effect by embedding a bunch of slideshows onto one Web page and then playing them all at once. More practical, however, are SlideShare's Facebook app and its API for developers. Check out this open-source slidecasting sample below (more examples here). If the audio doesn't play, you might be an early bird, so try again a bit later this morning: