Richard MacManus

Markus Frind is an interesting character, who has left some provocative comments on Read/WriteWeb before. He claims he’s earning $10,000 per day from Google Adsense from his dating website, plentyoffish.com. These claims have been vigorously challenged by some, but external data sources (e.g. see this comment thread) do seem to back him up. Recently Markus … Read more

Google is for the first time promoting its Personalized Homepageon the google.com homepage, using football World Cup modules/widgets. There is a “New! Add World Cup live scores and schedules to this page” promo link directly under the search query box, which leads to a “Welcome to Your Google homepage. Make it your own” start page. … Read more

This post was largely written by Ryan Stewart, a guest blogger on Read/WriteWeb. I’ve added my own Best of Breed picks for each category. Feed readers can be divided up into two general camps: The web based feed readers – such as NewsAlloy, Rojo, Bloglines and Google Reader – are mostly powered by Ajax and … Read more

Sun Microsystems is a company that doesn’t get anywhere near as much attention in the techmeme world as Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. Which is kind of odd for a company whose motto seems highly relevant to this era of the Web – “The Network Is The Computer”. I was listening to a podcast that Tim … Read more

Mike Arrington’s a bit peeved at Google. His post is a good vent, but to me the key bit was way down in comment number 33: “…my main gripe is that I want to understand what Google’s overall game plan is. I just don’t see it.” Nobody knows what Google’s grand plan is – I … Read more

Tim Bray doesn’t like Web metaphors: “The Web isn’t a platform or a database or an API or an OS a cloud or a clickstream or any other of those things. In fact, the Web isn’t even a thing, it’s a mesh of agreements with a nice straightforward engineering rulebook. Play by the rules and … Read more

Interesting moves in the online video market as YouTube announced “a major upgrade of its Web site” last Friday, just a day afterYahoo announced its own video upgrade. Both have introduced a channels feature – similar to tv channels, or so they like to claim. Yahoo’s June 1 press release was entitled: ‘Yahoo makes Web … Read more

Personalized Start Pages is a growing, but fiercely competitive, market. So what are they? Predominantly they’re homepages for Web information, gadgets and widgets. The difference from old-style web portals are: the user can personalize them much more (with RSS, inline email, etc), the content is more interactive and potentially much more useful (i.e. gadgets, widgets), … Read more

Jeff Clavier and Paul Kedrosky note that the chmod 777 definition of ‘web 2.0’ is coming back into fashion. As Jeff nicely put it: “Web 2.0 = chmod 777 web For those (non-geeks) who don‚Äôt get the reference, chmod is the Unix command allowing you to change the access control of a file or a … Read more

My buddy Ben Barren has just released his blog search engine, Gnoos. Even though recently I declared that the world doesn’t need another blog search engine, this is my second post about them this week! Techcrunch and Mashable, amongst others, have already gone over the feature set of Gnoos. No need for me to repeat … Read more

Ask.com is releasing a new blog search feature on their search engine, as well as integrating search more into their leading web-based RSS Reader Bloglines. You’ll recall that Ask.com (or Ask Jeeves as it was known then) acquired Bloglines in February 2005 – and ever since then a lot of us have been waiting for … Read more

Business 2.0 has an interesting write-up today on contenders in the mobile phone search industry. They point out that the Mobile Web is still a nascent technology. Well, to be frank it’s in the middle of a power struggle between telcos and standards bodies – which doesn’t help us users very much in the short-term. … Read more

Spotted on the blogosphere (via Ryan Stewart): Macromedia’s The Kiwi Project, which is about creating read/write web components for Flex. From the intro post: “With the rising interest in AJAX and RIAs, it became important for us to understand how to empower our Flex environment to create read/write web applications. This means developing Flex components … Read more

According to the Miniwatts Marketing Group’s Internet Usage and World Population Statistics (last updated March 31, 2006), worldwide Internet penetration is only 15.7%! So much for the World Wide Web… this is indeed sobering stuff for those of us obsessed with ‘web 2.0’ technology. Here’s the main table of stats: WORLD INTERNET USAGE AND POPULATION … Read more

I’ve come across two nifty apps recently that demonstrate a couple of neat things: 1) mobile web utility, and 2) integration with other web services. Both of those things are becoming increasingly important on the Web. The first app is called Bitty Browser and you may’ve come across it recently on other blogs. It’s described … Read more