Richard MacManus

Today I interviewed Geoffrey Arone, the co-founder of social Web browser Flock.com. Flock recently released its official beta, which they call version 0.7. They’re currently positioning their product as a mainstream browser which enables people to share and create online. Flock is specifically targeting people who use social networking media tools like MySpace and YouTube. … Read more

Next in my series on top Web apps in international markets is Russia. To remind you of the previous countries profiled: Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea and United Kingdom. Other country profiles coming soon include Spain, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand (if I can rustle up enough web apps from the NZ2.0 mailing list!), Latvia, China (I … Read more

Last night I published the first part of my interview with two senior Sun Microsystems engineers, Tim Bray (Director of Web Technologies) and Radia Perlman (Distinguished Engineer). The interview was to celebrate the 15th birthday of the Web this week. Several commenters on the Slashdot thread about my post said they’d prefer to get the … Read more

To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the World Wide Web, today I interviewed two distinguished people from Sun Microsystems – Tim Bray (Director of Web Technologies) and Radia Perlman (Distinguished Engineer). Sun of course was one of the key Web companies from the 90’s and is still going strong today, under the leadership of Jonathan … Read more

While I’ve been busy profiling international “web 2.0” startups and products, Techcrunch has put together a video documentary that explores web 2.0 in Silicon Valley. This seems to be aimed at mainstream business people, telling them what this web 2.0 thing is all about – and positioning the Techcrunch brand at the center of it. … Read more

The Animas Weblog has written a couple of interesting posts in response to Ebrahim Ezzy‘s Search 2.0 posts, featured on Read/WriteWeb recently (part 1 and part 2). In the first post, Animas frames his argument as a David vs Goliath struggle (the search 2.0 startups being, of course, David). Original image However in the Gospel … Read more

Engadget is providing superb coverage of the Apple World Wide Developer Conference, currently in progress in San Francisco. I’ll zero in on the bit that interested me the most – one of my hobby horses, widgets (mini web apps). At the conference Apple said there are currently 2500 widgets in Dashboard. They announced two enhancements … Read more

The latest Technorati State of the Blogosphere report shows that 39% of all blog postings are in english. Japanese is the second-most popular language, at 31% and China third with 12%. Here’s Technorati’s pie graph for June ’06: Dave Sifry notes that there are some significant underreporting issues, especially in Korean and in French. For … Read more

Continuing my series on international Web apps, today I’ll be covering the top products in the United Kingdom market. In case you missed it, over the past week or so I’ve reviewed Germany, Holland, Poland and Korea. This week I’ve got more great non-Silicon Valley startups for you! The information for today’s post about the … Read more

In my search for innovative web and Internet applications, I noted the buzz around new P2P company Skyrider at the end of last week. While it’s hard to say whether Skyrider is truly innovative, seeing as they don’t actually have a product on the market yet (it’s due “in the fall”), they are making interesting … Read more

15 years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee publicly released his WWW project onto the Internet. According to Wikipedia: “On August 6, 1991, he [TBL] posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.” As … Read more

With the launch of Microsoft’s blogging and social networking platform, Windows Live Spaces (formally MSN Spaces), there has been an increase in interest around gadgets – i.e. mini web apps. People can add gadgets into their Spaces site and Microsoft is starting to promote this feature heavily. Jay Fluegel of Microsoft has written a post … Read more

Next in my series on international web apps is Korea. I have Chang W. Kim, who runs a blog called Web 2.0 Asia, to thank for providing me with all the info. Korea is in many ways ahead of the curve in terms of the Internet. It has the highest household penetration of broadband internet … Read more

Mitch Kapor, famous for co-founding Lotus 1-2-3 in the 80’s and more recently the ambitious Personal Info Manager product Chandler (which is taking an awful long time to build – it’s still in alpha after 3-4 years) has a new startup project. That’s Mitch Kapor in the center of the photo btw, next to Bill … Read more

Tom Wolfe could write a novel about this…or at least a short story. Cartoon by Oliver Widder, via Nick Carr’s comments. Jason Calacanis also notes: “I think we have three of the top 20 DIGG users (and two from the top 10!). We also hired from Newsvine, delicious, and Reddit top users.” Finally here’s a … Read more