Today in an 8,000+ word epic on Windows on ARM, Steven Sinofsky finally lifted the curtains on some of what we can expect from Windows 8 running on ARM architectures, which he says will be available in the same time frame as the general availability of Windows 8.

Included in the blog post is a video showing off Windows on ARM (which is available only as a downloadable .wmv, but conveniently uploaded to YouTube by Tom Warren of The Verge:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

In the video, we get a quick look at not only the new “Live” Metro style apps like Mail and Calendar:

(nice and clean!)

…but also a peek at how Office 15 will look, also very clean:

We’ve seen some of this before, of course, but it’s nice to get a peek at what’s to come, and it gets us itching to play with the “Consumer Preview” when it launches on February 29th!

LiveSide.net

In a blog post at her eponymous website, Arianna Huffington has provided some numbers that describe the growth of the news network over the past year — a year that coincided with its acquisition by AOL for $ 315 million — and more than a few of them are eye-popping. At a time when some newspaper websites are happy to get page views in the tens of millions in a month, The Huffington Post racked up more than a billion page views in December. And while page views can be inflated, some of the site’s other metrics show that if there’s one thing the team that build the HuffPo understands, it is how to get reader engagement to hit levels that other news sites and publishers can only dream of.

It should be noted that AOL started redirecting its existing news portal site to the Huffington Post site in May, which undoubtedly helped boost many of the traffic numbers (although it’s not clear just how many visitors the AOL News site was getting when it made the switch). That could help explain why unique monthly visitors — a metric that many websites prefer over raw page views — climbed by almost 50 percent to 36 million. But in any case, that puts the site ahead of the New York Times, and not far behind the Daily Mail, the largest newspaper site with 45 million unique visitors a month.

Not the web’s largest news site, but it’s getting there

The Huffington Post isn’t quite the largest news site on the web just yet — Yahoo News says that it gets more than 80 million unique visitors a month, and more than 5 billion pageviews, and CNN gets about 73 million uniques a month. And there are some other massive websites who are on the fringes of the media business: Reddit recently crossed the 2 billion page-view mark, and says it gets about 34 million uniques a month, and Tumblr said recently that it gets over 15 billion page views a month, and reaches about 120 million users through its network of 42 million blogs.

Apart from the monthly unique visitor or page-view figures, however, some of the most fascinating numbers from Huffington Post are the ones around reader participation, including more than 6 million comments in the past month alone, and more than 1.4 million referrals from Facebook in a single day. Some of the other numbers include:

• Comments on a single day: 253,331 (Jan 25, 2012)
• New commenters signing up per day: 5,500
• Social referrals in a month: 21.6 million (December 2011)
• Facebook referrals in a day: 1.4 million (January 4, 2012)
• Blog posts in last year: 61,688
• Stories published per day: over 1,000

One of the secrets to the site’s massive traffic numbers is probably the sheer volume of stories and blog posts that Huffington Post publishes — over 1,000 every day. Many of those, of course, are likely to be the kind of “aggregated” story from another publication that has drawn so much criticism from traditional news entities such as the New York Times. And in many cases, at least judging by the numbers above, the Huffington Post is probably getting orders of magnitude more engagement from readers even on those stories than the newspaper or website that originally carried them.

The lesson: Use whatever social tools are available

Among the things the Huffington Post did that helped make it a social-news behemoth was to integrate Facebook’s open platform (then called Facebook Connect) into the site almost as soon as it was launched — something that immediately allowed readers to see what articles their friends had read, shared and commented on. That drove millions of readers to the site, and also boosted the number of comments by over 50 percent. And the site has also integrated virtually every other sharing tool known to man to make it easy for readers to share, and even come up with some of its own.

Traditional media critics attack the Huffington Post for its aggregation, but as Nieman fellow David Skok pointed out recently at the Nieman Lab blog, aggregation is deeply embedded in the DNA of the media industry, and always has been. And as we’ve tried to point out before at GigaOM, aggregation and particularly curation are two of the skills that modern media companies need the most — or readers overwhelmed by information will go elsewhere, whether to apps like Flipboard and Zite or to new services that give them the tools they need to filter that growing ocean of content.

Some media outlets are experimenting with new services that show they understand this, including Reuters with its just-launched Social Pulse feature — which aggregates top news from both its wire service and other news sites. Meanwhile, new players like BuzzFeed (which is run by many of the key players from the early Huffington Post) are moving from being just aggregators to becoming news entities in their own right by hiring reporters, and even Tumblr is hiring journalists to act as curators of its network — a very media-like thing to do. New media entities are everywhere, it seems.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Libertinus Yomango and World Economic Forum

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• NewNet Q1: Content Farms and Niche Networks on the Rise

src='http://ads.gigaom.com/show/rss/'
alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

Amazon DynamoDB is a fast, scalable NoSQL database service designed for Internet-scale applications.
With growth spikes, web-based apps often run into database scaling challenges. Learn how DynamoDB can help at the Feb. 15 webinar. Reserve your seat!

src='http://ads.gigaom.com/show/rss/'
alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

Microsoft has offered up more information about how the new file system designed for Windows 8, known as ReFS, will be handled in a new post on the official Windows 8 blog site. Read more…

Neowin.net

In just half a decade, cloud computing has evolved from novelty to IT’s big growth area. But what will the next five years – or even six months – hold? And how can your team adapt to the change? With the new year upon us, Alistair Croll, the conference chair of Cloud Connect and a partner at Bitcurrent, offers the top 12 predictions in cloud computing for 2012.

12. Here comes one really messy leak. We’ll see at least one spectacularly messy breach of data, and, of course, the cloud will get the blame, spurring regulators into action, enforcing two-factor authentication and password generation, and refreshing policies.

11. The advent of big data. The rise of large, unstructured data sets, along with the tools to crunch and interact with them, is poised to change every facet of how organizations make decisions.

10. The move out to public clouds. Look for a resurgence in public cloud adoption this year, albeit with a savvier approach compared to years past.

 9. The move to platforms. IT needs to deliver platforms, not machines. The best IT teams will be those that embrace private and public Platforms-as-a-Service and worry about real issues such as lock-in, usage costs and compliance atop such systems.

Interested in learning more? Read the complete list now.

Become a cloud expert at Cloud Connect Santa Clara this Feb. 13–16. Register today with code GIGAOM to save 25 percent on all conference passes or get a free Expo Pass.

src='http://ads.gigaom.com/show/rss/'
alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

In just half a decade, cloud computing has evolved from novelty to IT’s big growth area. But what will the next five years – or even six months – hold? And how can your team adapt to the change? With the new year upon us, Alistair Croll, the conference chair of Cloud Connect and a partner at Bitcurrent, offers the top 12 predictions in cloud computing for 2012.

12. Here comes one really messy leak. We’ll see at least one spectacularly messy breach of data, and, of course, the cloud will get the blame, spurring regulators into action, enforcing two-factor authentication and password generation, and refreshing policies.

11. The advent of big data. The rise of large, unstructured data sets, along with the tools to crunch and interact with them, is poised to change every facet of how organizations make decisions.

10. The move out to public clouds. Look for a resurgence in public cloud adoption this year, albeit with a savvier approach compared to years past.

 9. The move to platforms. IT needs to deliver platforms, not machines. The best IT teams will be those that embrace private and public Platforms-as-a-Service and worry about real issues such as lock-in, usage costs and compliance atop such systems.

Interested in learning more? Read the complete list now.

Become a cloud expert at Cloud Connect Santa Clara this Feb. 13–16. Register today with code GIGAOM to save 25 percent on all conference passes or get a free Expo Pass.

src='http://ads.gigaom.com/show/rss/'
alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

Microsoft raised a few eyebrows last month when it released its My Xbox LIVE app for iOS devices. Now it seems they intend to go further, with Xbox gaming for mobile platforms beyond Windows Phone. Read more…

Neowin.net

It’s not often that a fundamental change sweeps through the development community with such potential and achieves widespread adoption in under 12 months, but node.js is that. In that same short time developers have turned node.js into the most active git repository, passing Ruby on Rails as the most popular environment for building real-time distributed applications. This pace of deployment has put node.js in the spotlight within not just the development community but also every aspect of today’s technology-focused business.

Node Summit 2012 is the only conference to focus on how node.js is transforming the future of computing and is the first-ever conference devoted entirely to the business implications of the server-side JavaScript environment. At Node Summit you will hear from companies like Microsoft, eBay, Wal-Mart, Emerson, Intel and VMware on how they are taking advantage of node.js. You will also see 36 exciting startups compete in the first-ever NodeJam startup competition.

The two-day conference will be held on Jan. 24–25, 2012, in San Francisco. Registration is now open — discounted tickets still available.

The agenda has all the details about sessions that are packed with topics such as real-time web, high-performance computing, scalable applications, networked applications, endpoints at scale and Platform-as-a-Service.

For more information, visit www.nodesummit.com or follow us on Twitter @NodeSummit. We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco in January.

src='http://ads.gigaom.com/show/rss/'
alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

SingleHop’s public cloud was built with flexibility and on-demand functionality at its core. These guys understand an instance needs to have a lot more than scalability as the key feature. After all, what cloud doesn’t have scalability?

For one American dollar, SingleHop provides:
• Instant scalability
• Instant deployment of any OS
• Instant customization

Oh, and the controls are so easy to use, any newbie/rookie/greenhorn can deploy an instance in a matter of minutes. Act now, because the coupon code, CLOUD6, expires on New Year’s Eve.

src='http://ads.gigaom.com/show/rss/'
alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

Technology is moving faster than we can keep up with: From our devices becoming smaller and faster to the explosion of social media fueling online conversations and connecting people all over the globe to green innovations that are contributing to a sustainable planet, technology is becoming more and more intertwined in our everyday lives to simplify, connect and improve.

Looking at how far technology has evolved thus far, we want you to tell us: What do you think will be the biggest technology trends of 2012? What do you think these technology trends will take us next?

The most inspired response will receive an Intel Ultrabook — the Asus UX31E-DH52. We look forward to hearing what you have to say!

Here’s how to enter:
• Facebook “Like” Intel. http://www.facebook.com/Intel
• Tweet your response with the hashtag #IntelTechTrends2012
• Feel free to blog your answer and link to your post via Twitter using the hashtag #IntelTechTrends2012
• All answers must be submitted by Friday, Jan. 6, at noon PST

src='http://ads.gigaom.com/show/rss/'
alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM