Writer & Tech Journalist
Richard MacManus 
Today I’ve gone live with a new website and email newsletter platform for Cybercultural, my tech history newsletter that I started on Substack in 2019. What pushed me to migrate off Substack is its stance on hate content, which I personally object to. But over the past several months, I’ve also been pondering how to … Read more
I’m excited to launch a project I’ve been working on for over a year now: a book called Bubble Blog: From Outsider to Insider in Silicon Valley’s Web 2.0 Revolution. I will be serializing the book on my newsletter, starting this week, and it will also be released as a paperback in early 2024. The first … Read more
I came across the above tweet today from Joost de Valk, who was the founder of SEO product Yoast. For the benefit of those who can’t see the image, here is the main part (emphasis mine): If your content is not better than what Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) can generate on its own, based … Read more
I’m back! Blogging, that is. A quick note about how you can follow this blog on Mastodon, and about the upcoming serialization of my Web 2.0 memoir.
How emerging tech trends in the 2020s — metaverse aka 3D internet, Machine Learning, AR apps, web platform, and NFTs — are changing the way we perceive the world and ourselves.
This week I launched a new website: Web Development History. As the name suggests, it’ll be an ongoing chronicle of internet history — but from a development perspective. Simply put, I want to describe how the web actually works and how that has evolved over the past 30 years.
I’ve just finished a series of five columns for The New Stack about the serverless trend in cloud computing. It’s a terrible name, but basically serverless means removing all the backend burden for developers. No need to worry about infrastructure or servers, you just pay a platform like AWS Lambda to run everything — you … Read more
For the past few months, I’ve been writing a weekly tech column for The New Stack. The theme of the column is what’s next on the cloud native internet. It’s an update on my long-time blogging theme, what’s next on the web; which was also ReadWriteWeb’s mission statement. The term “cloud native” is how most … Read more
I’ve been thinking lately about what value long-form writing has in the current internet era, which is dominated by a combination of video (e.g. YouTube), images (e.g. Instagram), ‘in the moment’ multimedia (e.g. Snapchat, TikTok) and the black and white opinions prevalent on social media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook). There are two key aspects of the … Read more
A writer’s role is to build something thoughtful and/or delightful that is of value to people. It should help readers do their jobs, or help them understand the world, or help them cope with the world (by providing entertainment or comfort). Would that qualify as a “builder” in Marc Andreessen’s eyes?
I’ve been working at The New Stack for five weeks now, and am enjoying it more than any other job I’ve had since ReadWriteWeb. A big part of that is due to the team of people I’m working with, who have been generous with their time and knowledge, and welcoming. But I’m also feeling energized … Read more
Life in a time of pandemic, and updates about my new job and the status of my writing projects.
The writer and cultural critic Clive James died last November, at the age of 80. His website, clivejames.com, lives on. James viewed his website as a way to preserve his work, and even in a sense live forever. What he didn’t realise is that the Web forgets the past all too easily, and sometimes erases it entirely.
The advent of streaming, from Spotify and others, was the first sign that the internet might no longer be just a distribution channel for music. In fact, Spotify ended up fundamentally changing how we consume music.
Despite the dominance of Big Tech and the damage that social media has inflicted on the read/write web over the past decade, from a cultural consumption perspective we’ve got it very good at the end of 2019.