Richard MacManus

This Monday Digg will release the next version of the enormously popular community news site digg.com. Mike Arrington and I did a TalkCrunch podcast with Digg’s co-founder and Chief Architect Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson, in which we discussed Digg’s evolution and what the new product (which they refer to as “Version 3”) offers. … Read more

Panelists: Craig Newmark (Craigslist), Saul Klein (Skype), Tina Sharkey (AOL), Mena Trott (Six Apart), Gil Penchina (Wikia) Pic: Dan Farber; from left-to-right: Tina, Mena, Saul (doing a very good Robert Di Niro impression), Gil, Craig Panel Blurb: “Users are becoming active co-creators of their media, commerce, entertainment, and communications experiences. Just how significant, though, is … Read more

This workshop, moderated by Tara Hunt, split into 4 different groups for discussions. This format worked well and the group I joined, about little companies competing against big companies (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc) was an interesting one. The premise: you’re a startup launching a product, but just as this happens you find out a Google … Read more

I missed the ‘Decentralizing Data’ session at Supernova unfortunately (still on NZ time and so slept through my alarm this morn!), but Dan Farber has the story about Yahoo Local‘s new support for microformats. I spoke briefly to Andy Baio afterwards, so I plan to write a more in-depth post later on this news. Here’s … Read more

Paul Kedrosky points to a new service called PostApp, which is a new widgets syndication service currently in private beta. While the sign-up page doesn’t go into detail about what PostApp does, Fergus Burns from Nooked has an interesting post on this subject: “A new space is beginning to develop – widget marketing. Led initially … Read more

Today I arrived in San Francisco for two and a bit weeks of conferences and networking. This week I’m attending the Supernova conference, then it’s Dave Winer‘s BloggerCon IV and finally Chris Pirillo‘s Gnomedex. Marc Canter’s company Broadband Mechanics, who I work part-time for, is releasing People Aggregator at Gnomedex. So all the BBM team … Read more

Digg CEO Jay Adelson took time out of his busy schedule to email me some thoughts about Netscape’s new digg-inspired community news site. Jay’s thoughts below, but first some context. I’ve written two posts about the new Netscape site. In the Read/WriteWeb post I had two main points: 1) I think introducing paid editors into … Read more

Techcrunch has the scoop on the new Netscape portal beta, which bears a striking resemblance to Digg. Mike thinks it’s a “digg killer” and in terms of pure numbers it may well be. Netscape gets a surprising 811 million monthly page views, which digg is at around 200 M per month. But despite the Digg-ish … Read more

It’s a shame to hear from Bob Wyman that PubSub is in trouble and in big danger of shutting its doors. Bob says that “internal political issues” are behind PubSub’s demise and implies that this has deflected resources from actually improving the product. It’s not my place to comment on the politics, but I do … Read more

eBay, in collaboration with JotSpot, has just released a new community wiki – making it almost certainly the world’s largest wiki platform for a commercial website (Wikipedia is bigger, but it’s non-commercial). eBay Wiki is described as “a collection of fact-based articles written and maintained by eBay Community members” and is powered by JotSpot’s innovative … Read more

Sampa is an interesting new homepage-builder product that has just gone into beta. Like a lot of the products I’m interested in these days, it’s quite hard to explain what it is! Sampa founder Marcelo Calbucci, an ex-Microsoftie who is still based in Redmond, calls it a “blog on steroids” – in other words, the … Read more

The official FIFA World Cup website is run by and co-branded with Yahoo. A Washington Post story today highlights the interactive and multimedia features of the site – including blogs, chat, and three- to five-minute video highlights for all of the 64 games. Also in lieu of live webcasts (not possible I presume because of … Read more

Open, freedom, dynamic, flexibility. Not words you’d traditionally associate with AOL. But they’re pushing on with their Open AIM platform, announcing more upgrades to it today. The latest updates are: – Support for AIM Bots – Location-based services – PC-to-PC voice calling – Support for developers working on the Mac OS X, Linux, and Pocket … Read more

It’s funny that I posted the PlentyOfFish.com post not long before the Scoble-leaving-Microsoft announcement predictably blanketed Techmeme. Because reading Robert’s latest post about his decision made me think about the fundamental reason why ‘Web 2.0’ is (dare I say it) in bubble phase right now. It’s the exact same reason the Dot Com bubble occured … Read more

I was pleasantly surprised that my post The Future of Personalized Start Pages get Dugg last week. Looking through the comments, most of the Digg readers liked Netvibes or Google’s start page. btw Google is still promoting its start page on the google.com page, which I think is significant (not many other people do though, … Read more