Relay for Life of Second Life is a charity event that celebrates the victories and remembers those that have been lost in the fight against cancer. Th 4th annual RFLofSL relay takes place today in the popular virtual network Second Life. Reports have been coming through the pipelines to let us know that the event has already amassed a ton money and it's only just begun!

It's Only Just Begun

RFLofSL was a huge success last year, raking in over $100,000 dollars and attracting more than 1,700 participates in the virtual walkathon event. This year RFLofSL is looking to top themselves with their relay today. This year, the fundraising goal is $125,000. RFLofSL is also expecting to attract more than 2,000 participants.

Exceeding Expectations

So far, the event has raised over L$43,408,587 in Linden™ dollar donations, which is the currency used in Second Life. In American dollars, that's over $180,000! They've also raised over $4500 in donations outside of Second Life in the first few hours of starting. There's still more than 20 hours left on the clock and it looks like this event will exceed all expectations.

Get Involved

In the web relay,

The main difference is location. SL residents set up and decorate campsites, and sell small items to help raise Relay money just like at your local relay. However, since this is a virtual environment you may see some teams offering blimp rides, or holding sailboat races inside the park.

Show your support for the Virtual Relay and find out more information on how to get involved at the official Relay for Life in Second Life site.

Here is a new cartoon from Rob Cottingham of Social Signal. Rob runs a regular cartoon blog called Noise to Signal, in which he puts in graphical form some of the big questions of the social web.

Users love it when products and services from one company are nicely integrated with one another. It helps to keep users from bouncing around services. Companies love it because it's a way to lock users in, while gaining their trust. Nevertheless, Google has me hooked on yet another product from their labs: iGoogle. While I may be late to joining the RSS dashboard game, here's a look at a few of iGoogle's new features that users will enjoy.

Gmail Integration

If you're using the Gmail widget in iGoogle, you can now maximize the widget box and get a full view of your Gmail account. Users can star messages, compose new eamils, and more. The only downside to this widget is that there is no access to your labels.

Google Reader Integration

Google Reader integration works a little differently from the Gmail integration. For feeds that you subscribe to in Google Reader, but also display in iGoogle as a separate widget, you can maximize the widget box for Google Reader style viewing. In this view you can also check your other feeds in Google Reader. This view seems to be only available for RSS subscriptions in both Google Reader and iGoogle.

Click to Enlarge

Gchat

You can now talk to your friends in iGoogle with the Gchat sidebar widget. Just be careful when refreshing the page because you may lose your ongoing conversations. Also, Firefox and Safari users will not have this feature at the moment. The chat widget will only display in Internet Explorer.

Click to Enlarge

Preview the New iGoogle

To preview the new iGoogle simply head to the iGoogle homepage and paste the following in the address bar:

javascript:_dlsetp('v2=1');

To revert back to the previous iGoogle simply paste the following:

javascript:_dlsetp('v2=0');

This is is by far one of the best integrations I've seen from Google and it looks as if it'll only get better as time goes on. I'd love to see the same integration style applied to other Google services such as Google Analytics and Picasa Photo Albums. For now, these new features and integrations have pulled me in as a new fan of iGoogle.

It's time to review the week that was on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we continued our ongoing analysis of the iPhone 3G and its accompanying App Store, we looked closely at a Gmail update to its contact management system, covered the US launch of Microsoft Live Mesh, and reported on a developer revolt with Google's Android. On the trends side we revisited the Facebook platform, asked whether startups need Community Managers, looked into mainstream usage of the browser address bar, and told you a story about how Twitter's "Fail Whale" was created.

Web Products

Gmail Tries to Be Less Creepy, Fails

Gmail, Google's powerful web based email service, announced some changes to its contact management features this week. Contact management has for some time been a contentious matter among Google Account holders - the company does strange and mysterious things with your email contacts, including tying them in to some other applications without anyone's permission. This week's new changes failed to alleviate those concerns, perhaps making the situation even less clear than it was before.

See also: Google Gears Coming to Gmail and Google Calendar Soon

iPhone: The New Personal Computer

When Apple first announced the launch of its iPhone platform, we wrote here that it is a game changer. Even the core of iPhone is a major advance in mobile computing, but with the platform iPhone becomes the new personal computer. The desktop from now on will be for professional and business work. Laptops aren't going away, but will get increasingly less personal use. The reason is that iPhone with its application platform is a better personal computer and it's widely accessible.

See also: RWW Predictions: iPhone Sales in 2008

Apple's App Store: 10 Million Downloads Later

Apple's App Store for the iPhone and iPod touch has been growing quickly since last weekend. As at Monday, close to 250 applications had been added. As Medialets reports, at the same time, the average price of those applications has dropped. Interestingly, free applications are getting higher average ratings from their users than paid apps.

See also: iPhone Apps For Social Networks and News Apps for the iPhone: NYTimes, AP, Bloomberg

Live Mesh Now Open to All of U.S.

Windows Live Mesh is Microsoft's software+services data synchronization platform. Because of its complex nature, most people assume that file synchronization is all there is to Live Mesh, but in reality, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft has big plans for the service and syncing files between computers and the cloud is just the start. When Live Mesh launched, it was currently a closed "technical preview" (that's Microsoft for "beta"). But now it appears that the Live Mesh guys have quietly opened up the platform for all of the U.S.

gPhone? Just a Rumor - The Real Story Is The Android Developer Revolt

Of course, we all know that the event of the past week (or perhaps we should say the event of the year, given the news coverage), has been the launch of the iPhone 2.0. Yet even amidst the iPhone news frenzy - the lines at the stores, the activations, the failures, the apps! - there was another phone getting some press too - the Google Phone. The rumor was that Google was going to build its own phone after all. Yet while that rumor was catching the headlines, the real story was taking place within the developer community itself.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Facebook Platform: The Fanfare Revisited

When the Facebook platform debuted last year it was touted as the next big thing. Media, VC, startups and big companies shared the enthusiasm for its future. And no wonder: Facebook enabled access to 50 million users. You no longer needed to bring the audience to your app. Instead your app could be delivered to one of the largest audiences around the web. And not just delivered, but injected into a massive social network. While it started great, it turns out things are not that simple. Three fundamental issues surfaced (read on for the details).

Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers?

You know what little startup companies need these days? They need to hire more people! It may be a frightening thought, but in an increasingly social world - being social is becoming an important full time job. "Community Manager" is a position being hired for at a good number of large corporations (see Jeremiah Owyang's growing list of people with that kind of job) but what about smaller companies? We asked a number of people what they thought and the following discussion offers some great things to think about, pro and con.

See also: Do Facebook Users Care About Commenting On Mini-Feeds?

Will Mainstream Users Ever Learn About The Browser's Address Bar?

Traffic analytics company Hitwise released search market share numbers for dating websites in June this week and two things were striking about the data. Ad supported free site PlentyOfFish is trouncing everyone in the dating game and huge numbers of mainstream users are still afraid to navigate there directly using their browser's address bar. The economics of user ignorance are serious and could have big implications for online innovation. Also check out the great discussion on this in the comments - we may have been convinced that this isn't such a bad thing after all.

See also: Google Getting Close to 70% of U.S. Search Market

The Story of the Fail Whale

How An Unknown Artist's Work Became a Social Media Brand Thanks To the Power of Community

Twitter users are very familiar with the iconic image of the Fail Whale. This social object has been latched onto by Twitter fans not just as a representation of Twitter's downtime, but also as a representation of the community's love for the service and their hope for its triumph over their many struggles. Despite Twitter's troubles, most of its users stayed true, watching and waiting as the team began the long process of recoding the application in order for it to scale up. As Twitter succumbed to the strain of running their under-provisioned service, the Fail Whale "over capacity" image would appear. And this image began to take on a life of its own. This is the story of the Fail Whale.

See also: Cartoon: Twitter Dating

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

RWW Live

This week we did our fourth RWW Live podcast, which we're running fortnightly on the TalkShoe platform. RWW Live is where a group of the ReadWriteWeb Network writers and editors get together to discuss the latest in web technology.

This week we devoted the whole episode to the iPhone. Participants were: ReadWriteTalk host Sean Ammirati, Steve O'Hear from our network blog last100, RWW founder and editor Richard MacManus, RWW Feature Writer Bernard Lunn and RWW Lead Writer Marshall Kirkpatrick, who joined about halfway through. You can listen to the podcast below (email readers click through).

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

The Blogher conference for and about women bloggers kicks off today in San Francisco and in honor of this important event, we decided to share some links to some of our favorite women bloggers here at RWW.

Gender is an important lens through which people communicate and that's still the case online. Below are links to some of our favorite women bloggers and some favorites from some web celebs you may or may not know. We hope you'll visit their sites and add more of your favorites in the comments.

ReadWriteWeb Favorites

Marshall Kirkpatrick

Many of my favorites were named by the people below, but a few unique ones include:

Anastasia Goodstein, founder of YPulse, a blog about marketing to youth that even non-marketers will enjoy reading.

Marjolein Hoekstra of CleverClogs, my RSS mentor.

Orli Yakuel, Go2Web2.0, frequently finds web apps first.

Laurel Papworth, SilkCharm, a fabulous Australian social media consultant I've just recently discovered.

Photo: Orli Yakuel, by Yaniv Golan

Sarah Perez

RWW writer Sarah Perez says our own Corvida is her favorite woman blogger, but she's got a list of others she likes a lot as well.

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, from Profy, a leading news blog about life online and promotion for the Profy blogging platform. Svetlana Gladkova, who writes on Profy.com as well as the Profy Development Blog is also one of Sarah's favorites.

Tamar Weinberg, Techipedia, is an internet marketing rock star and a repeat selection by several people asked to make a list for this post.

Veronica Belmont is a blogger and video blogger all over the internet.

Natalie Del Conte is a blogger and video blogger for CNet/CBS.

Gina Trapani leads the fabulous blog LifeHacker

Emily Chang writes and publishes all kinds of different sites, including PicoCool and eHub. Her design company created the most recent design for RWW.

Leah Culver is a founder of standards-happy microblogging platform Pownce.

Kara Swisher writes for All Things D and is one of the most powerful people on the web.

Sarah Lacy is a business writer, author and blogger focusing on tech.

Wow, what a list!

Photo: Sarah Lacy, by Brian Solis

Frederic Lardinois

RWW's Frederic Lardinois was a little late to the game, so many of his favorites were already taken by Sarah above (whose weren't?) - but here's a few folks he's adding to the list.

Susan Mernit used to work at Yahoo! Personals, is rumored to be working on a secret startup project and has lots to teach all of us about the social media space.

Xeni Jardin writes for weird-hunting blog BoingBoing and publishes media all around the world and web.

Lorelle VanFossen writes Lorelle on Wordpress, a leading source of education about using WordPress and about blogging in general.

Photo: Susan Mernit, by Brian Solis

Friends of ReadWriteWeb

Why stop at just our list? We asked a few other people to contribute. We hope you'll add your list of favorites in comments as well.

Matt Mullenweg is the creator of WordPress and another fan of Lorelle on Wordpress. He also named three other bloggers that were new to our list.

Kathy Sierra teaches people about usability and design. More than a year after a gender-based campaign of harassment led her to stop posting to her blog, Sierra remains a public speaker in high demand and one of many peoples' favorite bloggers.

danah boyd is an academic researching the culture of youth on social networks. If you've ever got some free time and want just one blog to read - hers is a good choice.

Tara Hunt is a marketing consultant and author. She blogs at Horse Pig Cow about how businesses can thrive in the changing online world.

Holly Ross

Holly Ross is the Executive Director of the Nonprofit Technology Network, NTEN. Her must-reads include:

Nancy Schwartz's Getting Attention, all about new media marketing for nonprofit organizations.

Michelle Martin's Bamboo Project is a blog about personal and proffesional development for knowledge workers.

Charlene Li is an outbound analyst at Forrester and co-author of Groundswell, a book and a blog about how big business can transform itself to engage in the social web.

Beth Kanter is a nonprofit tech consultant who has worked with nonprofit arts and community-based organizations for over twenty-five years. Words can't describe Beth's awesomeness.

Mike Linksvayer

Mike Linksvayer is the CTO of Creative Commons, a global organization working to create alternatives to traditional copyright law. His favorite bloggers include:

Wendy Seltzer is a technology law blogger who writes about Intellectual Property Rights.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor at Reason magazine and a blogger.

Michelle Thorne is a thinker, about free culture and a whole lot more.

Carolina Botero is a Colombian blogger who writes in Spanish about Free Culture and technology.

Curt Hopkins

Curt Hopkins is the founding editor of The Committee to Protect Bloggers, a blog and organization dedicated to protecting bloggers around the world from imprisonment, censorship and other offenses at the hand of authoritarian governments. Curt didn't hesitate for a moment before pointing us toward the following bloggers.

Esra'a Al Shafei is a 21 year old blogger from the Kingdom of Bahrain. She writes at Mideast Youth and at FreeKareem.org, a blog dedicated to agitating for the freedom of imprisoned Egyptian blogger Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman.

Israel-Canadian freelance writer Lisa Goldman writes about Israel and media.

Sokari Ekine is the founder of Black Looks, a blog about Africa, women in Africa and a whole host of other topics.

Who Are Your Favorites?

The blogs above are just a few of the many that are written by women leading public discussions about technology and many other topics online. Now that it's time for this year's Blogher conference, we'd love to take the opportunity to discover more excellent women who blogs. Who are your favorites?