Richard MacManus

There’s been a lot of talk recently about Josh Kopelman’s post, in which he wrote: “As more and more entrepreneurs start building what Fred Wilson referred to as second derivative companies, I think they run a big risk of designing a product/service that is targeted at too small of an audience. Too many companies are … Read more

I just noticed that MSN has a new project called MSN Originals, in which MSN will partner with content creators to deliver a “new generation of storytelling online”. It’s described as: “MSN Originals will expand the ways that top brands can tell their stories beyond standard media through in-content integration, and even have a seat … Read more

DataMashups.com is the latest Ajax-based web app development service to be released. It’s a hosted service for developers and offers an integrated development environment “to rapidly create mashups and web applications with limited or no need for server side code”. The service is based on the open source AppliBuilder – a AJAX builder tool. The … Read more

Stowe Boyd and Mike Arrington reported today that AOL’s new social networking product AIM Pages is now live. I’m told by my sources that it’s still in the testing phase, nevertheless it *is* live on the Web. There is a lot more functionality to come though. For example PaidContent wrote recently: “Unlike walled-garden Classic AOL, … Read more

Pageflakes, one of the little startups in the ‘personalized start page’ market, has come out with a page publishing feature that nicely connects with my post the other day: Web 2.0 market segment mashups. In that post I noted that we’re seeing a lot of market segment cross-over nowadays, in terms of functionality and feature … Read more

Late last week it was surprisingly revealed that Microsoft now aims to be a media company, rather than a software company. This was in the context of Microsoft’s launch of its adCenter product, a direct competitor to Google’s Adsense and Adwords. But there it was in black and white, in a Microsoft press release: “”Ad-supported … Read more

As a Web (2.0) consultant and analyst (about me), I track a variety of market segments and products. Luckily for me, nowadays I don’t have to do as much grunt work on gathering high level product data as I used to. There are a plethora of product lists and data about web 2.0 companies on … Read more

Mike Riversdale asked an interesting question in the comments of my previous post: “What, in your (and others) opinion, is the difference (if any) between the “online desktop” (A) (I’m thinking Netvibes and the like) and the “Personal Content Network” (B).” Actually I’m seeing a lot of crossover and cross-pollination in the market segments I’m … Read more

In part 3 of my look at mc aggregators [here are parts 1 and 2], I get stuck into Suprglu. In this post I ask the question: how sticky is this site? But enough puns, let’s get down to business. SuprGlu, a production of New York design studio Iridesco, is another product that enables users … Read more

– Talkin’ bout a media revolution (BBC article on, er, BBC media. And they chose the worst possible Murdoch photo to use 🙂 Anyway, it’s an interesting article on how media is coping with web 2.0) – BW on News Corp Web strategy (“Fox Interactive Media has picked up two small Web companies to complement … Read more

The big news of the night is Yahoo’s release of a new technology portal, aimed squarely at non-geeks (see site tour). To make the point it’s not for geeks, the site features 4 stereotypical “advisors” (aka bloggers): The Boomer, The Mom, The Working Guy, The Techie Diva. They are described as “struggling with tech every … Read more

Continuing my look at Microcontent Aggregators, Peoplefeeds is right up there with 43Things.com as a leader in this market. Before I start the review, I came across a new Web 2.0 list today called categoriz – which puts Peoplefeeds in its ‘Content Management’ category and the others I’ve been tracking in categories such as ‘Social … Read more

I’ve been writing a lot recently on the topic of Web Office, over at my ZDNet blog. Some R/WW readers may be interested in checking out those posts too, so here are the recent ones: – Morfik tests browser boundaries – builds Javascript chess app – WebOS market review – XIN – a Web OS … Read more

News Corp has quietly released its own set of blogs, dubbed “Newsblog”. The design is rather bland and the actual personalities of the bloggers is not revealed. It all seems a bit too corporate for my tastes, but some of the ‘blogs’ are getting a large amount of traffic already. For example a post about … Read more

James Governor of analyst firm Redmonk has posted a thoughtful piece on how blogging is changing the analyst and PR landscapes. When he wrote this part, he may as well have been talking about myself and Read/WriteWeb: “Bloggers and emerging non-traditional analyst firms are increasingly influencing technology and product strategies. In order to make money, … Read more