At Chirp it was said that the Annotations feature would launch in the 2nd or 3rd quarter of this year. Now the company's Developer Advocate, Taylor Singletary, said today on the Twitter developers list that it's not going to work out that way. "We haven't yet announced a release date," he said in response to an inquiry, "and it's still a ways in the future while we tackle some other projects."

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We've got an inquiry in with Twitter asking what that means, but it seems clear that the company is slammed with technical challenges, has other priorities and wrongly estimated the roadmap for this very important part of the platform. (Update: see below.)

Here's how Annotations will work. It will allow publishing software to mark-up Tweets with any kind of characteristic or namespace (local weather when and where a Twit did Tweet, for example) and any kind of value - cloudy with a chance of meatballs, for example. Twitter messages are fairly rich with metadata already and incredibly easy to analyze and build on top of, but Annotations would open that up so far the sky's the limit.

It's worth mentioning that Twitter's unveiling of Annotations at Chirp happened around the same time as, and was widely compared with, Facebook's launching of personalized content widgets and tentacles expanding all over the web, among other things. Facebook shipped its announced project, for better or for worse.

Twitter is Busy

In another email on the same list today, Singletary said that the processing of white-listing applications to ping Twitter's servers with a production-level frequency was clogged with backlog, growing more critical in its evaluations and being re-evaluated.

Numerous advertising technologies have been rolled out since Chirp as well. Annotations is a hugely ambitious strategy, and the squabbling over namespaces and standards was one that Twitter said it was going to let the market work out on its own. That made some people quite unhappy.

We've asked Twitter for clarification on the revised Annotations roadmap and will update this post with the company's response.

Update: A Twitter spokesperson responded to our inquiry and said that yes, Annotations will launch. "We'll still launch Annotations. The team that was working on Annotations is currently focused on our number one priority, which is site stability." No doubt Annotations could themselves pose scalability challenges. They could at least blow our minds, if not a series of related servers.

Below is an image of what each Tweet looks like under the hood right now, before annotations. (Click for full size view.) Each of those fields is powerful, but inflexible and defined by the company. Imagine a new one that's open to being defined however a publishing tool sees fit. That's the vision behind Annotations.

In our content farms coverage so far, we've focused mostly on textual content farms. But video may well be the next frontier. A startup called Howcast specializes in mass production of video content.

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I spoke to Sanjay Raman, Chief Product Officer at Howcast, to find out what its strategy is and what he thinks of Demand Media and other competitors.

How Howcast Works

As the name suggests, Howcast is all about how-to videos. As with other 'content farm' companies, Howcast has identified a big opportunity to provide so-called "evergreen" informational content on the Web across hundreds of thousands of categories. The rationale being that people search, mostly on Google, for instructional content. How To Shuck an Oyster, How to Save Water in Your Garden, How to Avoid Dropped Calls on the iPhone 4, and so on.

Howcast is betting that how-to videos will have more relevance to searchers in the near future, than textual how-to articles. And given that YouTube is already the 2nd largest search engine in the world, behind only Google, that seems a solid business assumption.

Distribution

Howcast launched in February 2008 and now has nearly 200,000 instructional videos. It streams 25 million videos each month on both its own web site and across a network that includes web portals like AOL and Yahoo, and TV-on-demand sites like Hulu and Dailymotion. Its biggest distribution platform though is YouTube, where it has over 150,000 channel subscribers. Raman said that around 80% of its videos are viewed offsite, with 20% being viewed on Howcast's web site.

It also has a strong mobile presence, which Raman said was key to Howcast's future growth. He noted that Howcast has had over 2 million app downloads across the iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry devices. The Howcast for iPad app alone has been installed by 150,000 iPad users (approximately 5% of global iPad users) and was for a time the number 2 free iPad app in Apple's App Store.

Raman noted that user engagement is very good on mobile - for example users watch videos on average twice a day and watch two videos per session. Perhaps for this reason, Raman said that the value of users on mobile is much higher than on other platforms.

The Quality Question

In my discussion with Sanjay Raman, Chief Product Officer at Howcast, the word "quality" came up a number of times.

Every time I talk to 'content farm' companies, they insist that the aim is to produce quality content. That's because the most common criticism of content farms is that they clog up search engines with poor quality content.

In Howcast's case, the content appears to be professionally produced. It outputs about 400 how-to videos each month, most of which flows through its Emerging Filmmakers Program. Raman said that the program attracts wanna-be filmmakers, who are looking for a place to prove their skills. Howcast pays between $50-$300 per video.

Raman told me that Howcast wants to keep the content bar high. He claimed that Howcast has a much higher ratio of subscribers per video than Demand Media. Howcast is "not necessarily playing the volume game," he added.

Comparison to Demand Media

Who is the top YouTube provider, measured by views? You guessed it, Demand Media. This is because it produces far more video content per month than Howcast (Demand competes directly with Howcast with its property eHow). While Sanjay Raman didn't have exact figures, he estimated that Demand Media produces about 10 times more videos every month than Howcast. However he implied that this resulted in lower quality videos.

"Demand Media takes tasks and makes them smaller than they need to be," said Raman.

He also claimed that Howcast's playbacks per video are higher than Demand Media's. Howcast averages 44-50,000 playbacks per video, he told me, whereas Demand is around 7,000 per video.

Despite Demand Media Threat, Howcast Well Positioned

Many questions about content farms seem to center around whether other companies can compete with Demand Media, which operates on a much larger scale than its competitors. Perhaps the only company capable of stopping Demand's relentless growth is Google, which is reportedly tweaking its algorithms to better account for quality over quantity.

Howcast is hoping that its focus on professional video-making, via its filmmakers program, will lead to high search results. That remains to be seen. One thing that Howcast definitely has going for it is its positioning in the mobile space, which is increasingly where video content is consumed.

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Different from the iPhone Version

The Android application is similar in some ways to its iPhone counterpart, Real Time Congress, released at the beginning of the year. Like the the Apple version, the Android app makes it easy to see what's happening inside Congress in a timely fashion.

However, unlike the iPhone app, the Android version offers a greater focus on your representatives and their activity. This is something which iPhone users already had access to, explained Sunlight Lab's Clay Johnson back in January: there are "at least a half-dozen" third party applications for iPhone that do the same, he said . But in the Android Marketplace, there's only the one: Congress.

Congress: App Details

From the app's main screen, Android users can enter in their location, either by tapping into the phone's GPS or by manually entering a State or zip code. Search functions for finding a particular representative or committee are also present and, at the top, there are sections for tracking votes and nominations.

Each representative has an easy-to-use profile page where their office's phone number is prominently featured. Here, you're also one tap away from voting records, sponsored bills, committee details, news articles, Twitter updates and YouTube videos, assuming your rep participates on social media. The rep's own webpage is also linked by way of an icon found next to their profile picture.

Government in Your Pocket

For mainstream users who don't try software in beta (aka "we're still testing it") format, Congress for Android may be their first peek into the power of mobile combined with the power of open data, specifically open governmental data. The application was built using the Sunlight Congress API and GovTrack.us, the former a tool to programmatically access basic information on members of Congress, and the latter a civic project for tracking Congressional activity.

Like all Sunlight projects, Congress is open source software, meaning other developers can view and reuse the code, stored here on Github.

Since the app's launch into public beta late last year, over 250,000 Android owners have downloaded it. Now that the app has officially and publicly launched, that number is sure to rise.

In the future, the app will be updated to support real-time notifications and other "exciting features," says Sunlight Labs. Those interested in downloading the app can do so now from the Android Market: just search for "Congress."

Webb, who was already running a successful company geared toward bringing traditional media organizations up to speed with digital technology, pulled together some of her fellow consultants and scheduled a free webinar for recently laid off journalists. Not long after the two-hour primer on must-have digital media skills ended, Webb and her colleagues started getting emails from would-be participants begging to know when the next one would be. By the second webinar, 50 participants had ballooned to over 200, and a third session had 600 sign-ups.

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"I thought this might be an idea for something bigger," says Webb, whose team quickly began building an all-in-one digital media training resource on the Drupal content management system. Almost by accident, Knowledgewebb was born.

For $129 per year, members of Knowledgewebb get access to webinars, live chats, tip sheets and discussion forums on topics ranging from setting up one's home office to social media strategy to advanced SQL programming, all taught by a variety of expert instructors.

What started out as a means for journalists to learn new skills expanded into a learning community for all professionals, entrepreneurs and small business owners. The site's Entreprenuership track contains lessons on non-disclosure agreements, working with contractors, monetizing your website and maintaining a healthy life-work balance. Looking to start a Web-based business? One class offers a comprehensive checklist of everything you need to take into account. Other tracks include Blogging, Code, Social Networks, Metrics/Traffic, and Personal/Professional Development.

It's not just entrepreneurs and media professionals who could benefit from Knowledgewebb's cirriculum, says Webb. "There are a lot of really smart people out there working in whatever field they work in. They're sort of at a point now where they can't sit in a meeting and say I don't really get this Twitter thing. We have a whole bunch of content available for people like that."

After a successful first iteration, Knowledgewebb recently relaunched with new features designed to make the learning process more motivating and social. In what Webb touts as a first for Web-based education, the site now uses Foursquare-style merit badges, which can be unlocked by completing classes. These badges display on the user's own profile, as well as next to their name when they participate in discussions forums, signifying their achievements thus far.

"What we're doing is cultivating experts inside the network," says Webb. "We have the designated experts, and then we have Knowledgewebb users who have taken a lot of classes and earned these badges, so other users can instantly see who's a trusted member of the community."

In addition to badges, Knowledgewebb recently rolled out a course scheduling tool called My Digital Planner, which breaks down a user's completed classes and lists the ones they are planning to take in the future. Once a course is completed, users can generate a report to demonstrate their proficiency to employers or educators.

ReadWriteWeb readers can save 30% off a Knowledgewebb subscription with the the discount code RWW2010

Social Translate is a new open source extension for Google's Chrome browser that translates updates on social networking sites into your native language using Google Translate.

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You can choose between "reliable," which appears to attempt fewer translations, or "aggressive," which is less accurate but attempts to guess at more words.

Of course, Google Translate's ability is limited, and it seems to extract less meaning when the sentences are short.

A tweet from one of the top users in Beijing translated from Chinese to English using Social Translate.

Social Translate is a useful and relevant idea for a web that is increasingly composed of conversations. The extension has some shortcomings and a few bugs, judging by a quick test and its page on Google Code.

It detects languages correctly on Twitter and translates acceptably (except for the fact that Google Translate often turns up total nonsense), letting users skip the Google Translate prompt that appears when you navigate to a site in a foreign language. If your first language is English but you're also fluent in Spanish, you can tell Social Translate to display Spanish tweets but translate any other language to English.

On Facebook, the extension is measurably less useful. It only translates status updates as they appear in your News Feed - not in comments on updates, in profiles or on users' walls.

It appears the two developers, Andrew Swerdlow and Nav Jagpal, are still working out the kinks with this extension. I could not get the extension to work for MySpace or Google Buzz, although the developers intend for it to work for those services.

Life in a Day is being marketed as a "user-generated feature film shot in a single day." The creators are asking people around the world to upload their quotidian videos to a YouTube channel. The director, Kevin MacDonald ("The Last King of Scotland"), will cut it together.

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Produced by Ridley Scott, the director of "Black Hawk Down," "Gladiator" and "Blade Runner," the film is also planning to fold in video from cameras given to people (including NGO workers) in "remote" places. Presumably, all the video is supposed to have been shot on July 24. However, as a clock on the YouTube Channel indicates, contributors have until the end of the month to upload that video.

Whose life is it anyway?

One of the key issues with a project like this is how honest the filmmakers are about how much of their sensibilities and values inflect the project. The other is, simply put, how interesting it will be as a film.

To these issues should probably be added the effect Google will have on the how and why of the film. Google, which owns YouTube, is deeply involved with its production. It's difficult to say how hands-off a company when it has an opportunity to leave its fingerprints on a Ridley Scott movie. Merely by spearheading it and influencing its manner of gathering and distribution it's already done a great deal of that.

No, but seriously. A day in whose life?

The film has been pre-accepted into the Sundance Film Festival. It has been reported that the contributors whose videos are used will not be paid, but the film will not be sold to a studio either. Instead, it will be available for viewing on YouTube. 20 contributors will be brought to the Sundance premiere, apparently.

Frankly, it's difficult to imagine how the film is going to capture an average day in anyone's life, much less the whole of a day for everyone. Among the many elements that will inform the shape of the finished product are the following.

• It's being produced by an action movie director
• Contributors are required to abide by YouTube's TOS
• The film has been pre-approved by one of the world's leading money factories for new movies
• It looks like it will be larded with self-consciously authentic video from remote places*

It seems more likely that a film about a specific time and definitely place by a single filmmaker might have a better chance of universality than a documentary about everyone by anyone.

But we will, quite literally, see about that.

*Just for the record: I'm reasonably certain that Namibia doesn't seem remote to the folks in Windhoek. And G-d protect us from a Dreadlock J. Collegestudent's paternalistic videos of Haiti or Cornelius Jamcrumpet III's fearless footage of himself hugging the Mashantucket Pequots!

It's an interesting story, and not a particularly reassuring one. It's not a particularly new one either, yet people continue to fall prey to these sorts of phishing schemes.

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Even if your startup's security doesn't quite rise to the level of military intelligence and classified information, you do need to pay attention to security issues. The stakes are higher than just the damage to your reputation if it turns out your CTO has friended the next "Robin Sage" on Facebook.

According to secure web hosting providers FireHost, over 17,000 websites are hacked a day, and it's no longer just governmental agencies that are the targets. So if your business relies on its website - whether for e-commerce or just online presence, then you should take steps to secure it - to both human and technical vulnerabilities.

When choosing a hosting provider, says FireHost CEO Chris Drake, many folks look for the statistics around up-time and performance. But security provisions need to be taken into consideration as well. After all, if your business relies on website up-time and performance, a security breach can cause as much damage - if not more - than your host provider simply going down. Fines for leaked credit card information, for example, might run upwards of $200 per affected consumer and the damage to your finances, let alone your brand, could easily ruin your business.

You might want to bookmark FireHost's list of steps to take if your website is hacked:

But an ounce of prevention, as the saying goes, is worth a pound of cure. And Drake recommends taking steps to prevent security crises before they happen.

Of course, as the "Robin Sage" story demonstrates, you can't rely solely on the technology to protect you.

We’ve all heard how frightened nearly everyone is of public speaking. Maybe that’s understandable, but it creates the potential for lots of misinformed conventional wisdom spread by people who have to make presentations but haven’t had the opportunity to learn what really works.

To help correct some misperceptions about what creates better presenters and presentations, here are eleven public speaking paradoxes for reluctant presenters to accept, embrace, and follow:

1. Minimize your public speaking nerves by looking for as big an audience as possible.

My theory on nerves and speaking? We all have a certain amount of nerves getting up in front of a crowd: the more people in the audience, the smaller the amount of your nervousness each audience member has to absorb. The theory may sound silly, but with more people in the audience, there’s a greater likelihood of spotting individuals who get your message and show it in their eyes – always a comforting sign for a speaker. The more people, the more likely someone will find your jokes funny and start laughing or be moved by your remarks and start applauding (and trust me, it takes somebody being the first to applaud). These nerve-settlers all benefit from having a bigger crowd.

2. If you’re concerned about forgetting what you’ll say, take all the words off your slides.

The typical crutch to avoid forgetting your presentation is to put every word on your slides so you can turn around and read them aloud – which always makes for a deadly presentation. Putting everything on-screen also allows the audience to stop paying attention to you since they can more efficiently read your slides themselves. With only images (or at least very few words) displayed, however, if you forget your remarks or cover something different from what was originally written, nobody knows because the audience has no visual reference to spot the variation. You enjoy all kinds of freedom to change up what you say and how you say it, making it much easier to cover your forgetful moments.

3. To compare more favorably to the great motivational speaker on the agenda, ask to speak right after them.

Unsure speakers try valiantly to stay as far away as possible on the agenda from exciting speakers because they think they’ll seem worse by immediately following a keynoter. That’s simply a bad strategy. There’s invariably a buzz among the audience after an exciting, engaging speaker, and it’s wonderful to bask in it as the agenda’s next presenter. Not only do you get a free pass to lunch off the audience love the previous speaker created, you can always refer back to a point your predecessor made to refresh the audience’s glow while you’re onstage.

4. To satisfy audience requests for presentation materials, refuse to provide slide print outs.

Handing out your slides before the presentation creates a distraction as audience members are tempted to look at them and ignore you. Plus if you’ve taken the advice to primarily use graphics on your slides, having them won’t be of much learning value anyway. Instead, write an article with your presentation’s key points and invite the audience to visit your blog to review it. If you don’t have a blog, write your presentation summary to share with the event organizer for its blog or website. You’ll expand your reach, providing both your in-person audience and others interested in your topic the opportunity to learn from what you have to say.

5. When you want the whole presenting experience to just be over as quickly as possible, show up way early and make a day of it.

One of the best things you can do as a nervous presenter is to arrive early since it provides several advantages. You can see where you’ll be speaking, determine where to stand, and figure out solutions to challenges the equipment or conference venue create. You’ll also be able to arrange the setup so your computer will be in front of you – serving as a monitor – eliminating the tendency to turn away from the audience to see what’s on the screen. Being there early allows you to meet and interact with audience members, learning what interests them. Finally, you can watch other presenters so you can amplify or avoid points they’ve made, as appropriate. All these benefits will help make your presenting time seem to pass much more quickly.

6. If answering questions makes you nervous, encourage lots of them.

Questions are a giant opportunity to customize your content to what’s most relevant to the audience. They also provide a chance to catch your breath and drink some water as you turn the attention over to the audience momentarily. To get questions started, plant a few with people you’ve met before the talk so you begin with ones you are ready to address.  Plus always remember: if you’re stumped for an answer, ask other audience members to share their perspectives on the challenging question.

7. If you have a really loud voice, demand a microphone.

So many people, especially self-conscious men, try to avoid using microphones because they talk loud. Use the microphone. With a microphone, you can speak at your normal volume while also raising and lowering your voice as you’d like to create continued interest in what you’re saying and how you’re delivering the message.

8. Stand up while you present on a conference call or webinar because no one can see you.

Suppose you’re doing a webinar or other phone-based presentation. The natural tendency is to sit at your desk since the audience isn’t watching. True, but the wrong move nonetheless. Standing up and “presenting” your comments gives your voice more energy, which translates to a better phone-based talk. Bonus tip: don’t speak in the same volume you normally would for a phone conversation. Instead, over-emote since the phone dampens your delivery style. Delivering your message in this manner creates a much more engaging audience experience.

9. Since presentation mistakes are embarrassing when they’re noticed, point them out and have fun with them.

Some speaking mistakes are small and go unnoticed. Others (the computer or projector fails, a video doesn’t play) are apparent to the audience. Rather than dreading them, here are two things to do. First, anticipate what might go wrong and have a funny (ideally self-deprecating) comment to share for each one. Secondly, have a backup plan for each of the potential disasters. When you handle presentation adversity with a laugh and a quick recovery, you’ll win an audience over even faster than by delivering a seamless speech.

10. If you don’t like the sound of your voice, record it and listen to it over and over.

The single best investment I’ve made as a speaker has been a digital audio recorder to capture every presentation I do. While it can be tough to listen to yourself if you’re uncomfortable speaking, the gaffes you’ll hear quickly pinpoint areas to improve your skills. Another advantage? Next time you’re speaking on the same topic, you can review your previous presentation while rehearsing to remind yourself of what parts worked best and effective ad-libs that weren’t planned in your original remarks.

11. Deal with your anxieties about audience reactions by rewarding them for immediately sharing opinions.

While most conferences survey attendees, it’s often weeks later, and speakers frequently never receive results. That’s why the second best investment you can make in becoming a better presenter is creating your own simple evaluation form. Offer audience members a chance to win a book or give-away relevant to your presentation for sharing one thing they liked, didn’t like, found interesting, and would recommend about your talk. These four points from each presentation provide incredible feedback and reactions you never could have anticipated. The total cost of the books I’ve given away has paled in comparison to the improvement opportunities this strategy has yielded – especially from things people didn’t like.

There you have it. If you don’t enjoy speaking, these eleven paradoxes may seem very unnatural, but using them to your advantage will allow you to make dramatic improvements in your abilities as a public communicator!

Mike Brown leads The Brainzooming Group, helping organizations succeed more rapidly by expanding their strategic options and efficiently implementing innovative plans. He authors the Brainzooming™ blog, shares innovation ideas on Twitter, and wrote the ebook “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation.” He's also a frequent keynote presenter.

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However, the iPad has gained popularity in the artistic community - in particular thanks to an iPad app called Brushes, which enables you to 'finger paint' a colorful work of art.

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Art web site MutualArt reports that Brushes is being used to produce stunning works of art from professional artists such as David Kassan and Kyle Lambert. And internationally renowned British artist David Hockney recently said that the iPad "really is like a drawing pad. They will sell by the million."

Check out how David Kassan did a finger painting of a subject in this video. Note how he used the zoom feature to attend to details. The end result rivals anything done with paints!

Brushes was originally developed for the iPhone, by two ex-Apple employees: Steve Sprang and Kurt Revis. This year Brushes was redesigned by the pair, to take advantage of the iPad's larger screen.

The iPad app features brush controls, layers, an extensive color palette, zooming, high resolution export and a 'stroke by stroke' playback of the art work's creation. A Users's Guide for the iPad app was released just today.

A Flickr group has been set up for Brushes and it includes a lot of very impressive art work. I have to say, this app gives the lie to the commonly spouted iPad criticism that you can't create media with it - a claim that I heard repeated tonight by a "technology expert" interviewed by a local TV news network.

Infographics can make information more accessible, more enjoyable, and easier to understand. And when well-crafted, an infographic seems to lend itself to being incredibly viral, with potential to drive traffic and generate interest.

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On his blog Cool Infographics, Randy Krum lists tips for journalists designing infographics. But Krum's suggestions have application beyond journalism. If you plan to use infographics to tell a story, you should keep these things in mind:

1. Be concise. Design your infographic to make one main point.

2. Be visual and be creative. Although infographics do combine text and images, the emphasis should be on making a visually appealing graphic.

3. Be self-explanatory. The visualization should explain the data, with minimal exposition.

4. Be relevant.

5. Be transparent. Cite your sources.

6. Be different. Pie charts and bar graphs are readily understandable, but they can be pretty blase.

7. Be accurate. The visualization should not misrepresent your data.

8. Say something. Your infographic should convey a message, and not be an infographic for the sake of itself.

9. Be judicious. Not every story warrants an infographic.

And as with any copy you plan to post online, it's good to run your infographic by another set of eyes - to assess and edit both content and format.

Some examples:

If you are considering creating an infographic for your startup, spend some time thinking about what it is you want to communicate: your business plan timeline, your market or marketing strategy, your budget or financial projections, your product offerings, or your product differentiation, for example. Your infographic needs to address the right message, as well as the right audience.