Richard MacManus

last100 has the scoop on the rebirth of the open source Internet TV application as Miro: Miro (formerly known as Democracy Player) is an open-source Internet TV application that combines a media player and library, content guide, video search engine, as well as podcast and BitTorrent clients. Developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation, Miro aims … Read more

In our introductory post on Citizen Journalism (CJ), we reviewed Newsvine – an innovative and well-designed citizen journalism web site. In this post we’ll review two examples of ‘localized’ CJ: Buffalo Rising (Buffalo, New York) and PerthNorg (Perth, West Australia). A note for our Canadian readers: NowPublic is coming in a future post 🙂 Buffalo … Read more

When Facebook announced their “open platform” in May 2007, it suddenly became all the rage. Third party web app developers rushed to integrate their apps into this increasingly popular social network platform – and who could blame them? It makes sense for startups to have a presence on a platform that has tens of millions … Read more

I noticed a small, but perhaps significant, change in Facebook tonight. Usually when you add more friends to your Facebook account, you need to land on 3 separate pages for each friend: 1) the Requests page; 2) a Request Confirmation/Skip This Step page (I always click ‘Skip This Step’), and finally 3) back to the … Read more

This week is Facebook Week on Read/WriteWeb. Over the next 5 days we’re going to focus on the most impressive Web Company of 2007 – analyzing it and reporting on its top third party apps. To ‘launch’ Facebook Week, let’s review how this company turned itself into the leading web app platform on the Internet, … Read more

One aspect of Web 2.0 that continues to entertain is the strange, sometimes awful, names that startups come up with to promote themselves. Some of them turn out to be successful – e.g. del.icio.us – but others prove to be ineffective. Some web 2.0 names have been compared to Star Wars characters and there’s even … Read more

4 years ago today, 15 July 2003, AOL Time Warner disbanded Netscape Communications Corporation – the company that sparked the Dot Com Internet boom in the mid-90’s with its 1995 IPO. Also 4 years ago today, The Mozilla Foundation was established. mozillaZine reported at the time: “It has been learned through public and private sources … Read more

Sponsored by: Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email. Top Web News After all the iphone buzz of the last couple of weeks, it was a relatively quiet week of web tech … Read more

In the young but growing world of user-generated news, sites like digg and slashdot dominate in the tech sphere. In the political arena, it is mostly editorial-driven sites that do well – such as DrudgeReport, HuffingtonPost and RawStory. Those sites get a lot of attention, but there are also a lot of so-called “Citizen Journalism” … Read more

The International Herald Tribune had a good article recently about the search market in South Korea. It points out that local search company Naver.com has more than 77 percent of all Web searches originating in South Korea, according to Internet market research company KoreanClick. This is largely due to user-generated content – specifically Naver’s “Knowledge … Read more

Our poll this week asks: Which Web company impressed you the most over the first half of 2007? Mid-week, Facebook has a handy lead over Google. Facebook has 34% of the vote, with Google second on 27%. Apple is third with 15%, probably reflecting the recent iPhone launch. Note that we added Adobe and Mozilla … Read more

Our sister site last100 has started a 2-part series exploring Microsoft’s Internet TV strategy: There may not be another company as well-positioned to take advantage of the growth in IPTV as Microsoft. Despite being primarily a software company, Microsoft has long had a passion for television. The company launched the 24-hour cable news channel MSNBC … Read more

There are a number of DIY social network services on the market, and in this post we’ll take a look at 3 of them – Ning, vibEngine and PeopleAggregator. By DIY, we mean services that allow you to create a custom social network for any topic. These services can be either hosted or based on … Read more

That’s a dramatic and possibly even sarcastic headline, but it was derived from a real question asked in our current post comparing indie blog platforms Six Apart and Automattic. Commenter jm wrote: “the other vision is that blogging is dead vs myspace/facebook stuff. Where is the need for a individual expression tool when the whole … Read more

Just a week after acquiring online telephony service GrandCentral, Google has announced the $625M purchase of Postini – a company that offers “on-demand communications security and compliance solutions serving more than 35,000 businesses and 10 million users worldwide.” The press release noted: “Postini’s services — which include message security, archiving, encryption, and policy enforcement — … Read more