Richard MacManus

Quote from Rod Drury, founder and CEO of kiwi web email company AfterMail (which was acquired by Quest Software for US$45 million in January 2006): “We demonstrate globally from our office in Wellington, install our products remotely and receive funds electronically. We have US phone numbers in our office. The barriers to global commerce are … Read more

– The Return of Mr Safe (like a geeky version of Inspector Clouseau, Mr Safe is one of the enduring characters of the tech blogging world… in this latest episode he confronts his old foes Chief Inspector Funky and the evil Dr Fork) – Stowe Boyd on Advisory Capital (instead of investing money, invest expertise … Read more

On my ZDNet blog, I’ve reviewed the best Web Office products currently on the market. I believe some of these may be acquisition targets for Microsoft, Google or even Yahoo – as the big companies roll out the inevitable Web Office Suite. [Full story on ZDNet…] Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)

– TechCrunch leads Silicon Valley Web renaissance (I miss the Gatsby mansion… fun times in Silicon Valley) – Brian Oberkirch interviews Umair Haque (a nice Bubblegeneration 101 on Umair’s theories, which you should take time to grok if you’re in the new media business…) – Media Investing’s New Thing: Web2.0 (“Any traditional media company, with … Read more

– Amazon Plans Music Service To Rival iTunes (nice opportunity for server–>device integration here… among the plans: Amazon-branded portable music players for retailers and a subscription service) – MySpace goes mobile (launching a mobile service that will let users read and post to the site for free) – Alex Barnett screencast on ‘Attention Engines’ (this … Read more

Excellent quote from Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us: “Aggregation is often a focus of attention (latest, most active, etc.) As the population gets larger, the bias drifts; del.icio.us/popular becomes less interesting to the original community members. Work out ways to let the system fragment in to different areas of attention.” This sums up why 2006 is … Read more

– The Evolution of Information Grazing (more cow metaphors) – James plays the field (“Grazing, on the other hand, is feed promiscuity. No commitment.”) – Ross Levinsohn on Fox’s Digital Charge (how the News Corp. media giant is working to build a broad online base) – Dave Winer on professional media (“The pros are lazy, … Read more

I’ve read some absurd things in my time, but this one really takes the cake. It’s by a ‘big media’ guy at CBS News, who has written an astonishing spiel about what he regards as ‘Web 2.0’. It’s actually the first compelling thing I’ve read about Web 2.0 all year, but it was compelling because … Read more

After my post about Personalized Megite, I got taken to task by both Gabe Rivera from Memeorandum and Nik Cubrilovic from OmniDrive – two developers who have had a lot of experience trying to develop such systems. As Gabe wrote in Scoble’s comments: “I agree with Nik that there’s a huge technical chasm to cross … Read more

– The Trendiest Web2.0 Page on the Net! (it’s funny cause it’s true… apologies to Fred, who for all I know may’ve invented the ‘big red jagged circle’ effect) – ‘Future of Web Apps’ slides… (beautifully designed presentation from Tom Coates, with brilliant content to match. A ‘must read’ if you’re into Design for Data … Read more

Lately I’ve been noticing a number of people criticising the performance of the latest versions of Firefox, since 1.5. With IE7 coming very soon, with many of the features that Firefox has (tabs, RSS integration, etc), now is not a good time for Firefox to lose developer support. I don’t mean to sound alarmist, but … Read more

One of Memeorandum‘s new competitors, Megite, is testing out a Personalized version of their product. You will be able to upload your OPML file and a personalized news cluster will be created for you, based on the RSS feeds you already track. Here’s the demo page for my Personalized Megite. In many ways, this is … Read more

I’ve joined the Media 2.0 Workgroup, which isn’t associated with the Web 2.0 Workgroup which I co-founded – but was I believe inspired by it. I see the two workgroups as very complementary and so I’m trying to get the two groups to connect. On a personal level, the intersection of Web technologies and Media … Read more

Came across two great articles today that nicely summarize recent web development and design trends. Marc Hedlund from O’Reilly wrote a post entitled Web Development 2.0. Despite the YA2.0N title (Yet Another 2.0 Name, pronounced “YAWN”), the article is a useful overview of software development practices that Marc has been seeing in the current era … Read more

– Edgeio Edges Toward Launch (Keith, Mike and team are just about ready to eat eBay’s lunch…) – Fox getting set to monetize MySpace (another excellent analysis by Umair…”you’re about to see a very expensive attempt at building edge competencies unfold (or implode) in real time.”) – Bill Grosso: “Microsoft is focused on changing the … Read more