Richard MacManus

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

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