Richard MacManus

Well my declaration that Web 2.0 is dead set the cat amongst the pigeons. Let me give a bit of background… I’ve been thinking for a while now about re-focusing Read/WriteWeb onto more media-related Web technologies. Many of the things I’m interested in are being done by Yahoo!, which by now is generally recognized as … Read more

I’ve had enough of the hype. I’ve had enough of cynicism. I’ve had enough of hate blogs. The nail in the coffin was this post on ZDNet, by Russell Shaw. The thing is, I agree with Russell. The term ‘Web 2.0’ is distracting from the real value going on in the Web right now. Read/WriteWeb … Read more

The inventor of the World Wide Web is now blogging: “In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space for sharing information. It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute. The first browser was actually a browser/editor, … Read more

Ben Barren’s written an excellent series of posts about his favorite features to flip. Here’s his top ten: #1 – Podcasting Ratings #2 – Better Blogging Tools #3 – MySpace meets Linkedin #4 – Non-Text RSS Reader #5 – RSS Search/Reader Attention Glue #6 – Images for Adsense #7 – Podcasting Creation Tool #8 – … Read more

Here’s the Top Ten web technology and new media memes, issues or news stories of the past week. 1. Yahoo buys del.icio.us. Yahoo! continues its buying spree of cool Web app companies, after also buying Flickr and konfabulator this year. Bubblegeneration had a nice summary: “Yahoo, I think, is rolling up social plays so it … Read more

I’ve just published a list of the top ten defining moments of Web 2.0 this year. Here’s a taster, but please click through to ZDNet to read the whole post. It’s been a huge year for the Web! A time of renewed optimism in Silicon Valley and an incredible number of new web applications. In … Read more

Toni Schneider, who runs the Yahoo Developer Network, just announced the addition of JSON support for various Yahoo APIs and a new Javascript Developer Center. This is designed for people who “eat, sleep and breathe JavaScript” :-0. JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. According to the Wikipedia entry, JSON’s simplicity has “resulted in its widespread … Read more

Liked this quote from the recent Reuters Media and Advertising Summit in New York: “The media plan of the future will look like the tiles of your bathroom floor … a number of component pieces fitted together very precisely, but lots of pieces,” said David Verklin, chief executive of media buyer Carat Americas. Digging a … Read more

Phil Pearson, Marc Canter and others have been burning the midnight candle getting Structured Blogging up and running. It’s live now and Phil has a round-up of all the action. Structured blogging basically means publishing different kinds of information – like events, reviews and classified ads – in a ‘structured’ format, so that aggregators can … Read more

Feedburner has integrated Web services with feeds, in a new product released just now called FeedFlare. I got a sneak preview of FeedFlare and it’s currently activated in my RSS feed. You may have noticed some new active and contextual links at the bottom of each of my posts, in your RSS Aggregator. Things like … Read more

Joshua Porter has written a nice balanced introduction to Web 2.0 on Squidoo. Meanwhile I’m having a running battle with some idiots on the Wikipedia Web 2.0 page. One or more of these clowns keeps deleting any and all references to my websites and articles. Now I know what Dave Winer feels like when he … Read more

John Battelle just posted that Amazon is opening up its Alexa search data and tools to the world! According to John, Alexa has about 5 billion documents in its index, which is about 100 terabytes of data. With this move anyone will be able to use Alexa’s index to develop their own services. As John … Read more

I’ve noticed some excellent techie posts lately, so I feel duty-bound to point them out. Phil Pearson, XML expert Kimbro Staken and Movable Type consultant Chad Everett have been working on a Structured Blogging plugin for WordPress and MT. This is to enable ordinary folks (like me) to publish “new microcontent types, support microformats and … Read more

It’s that time of year when everyone brings out their Best Of 2005 and Top Ten lists. I wrote a post this time last year entitled Best Web 2.0 Companies of 2004. It didn’t get much of a response, because it was well before the Web 2.0 hype kicked in. Over the past couple of … Read more

Yahoo! has joined forces with the Seven Network, one of Australia’s leading television and media companies. A new 50-50 holding company will be formed that will own Yahoo Australia & NZ and operate under a new name, to be announced in January. A PDF presentation about the deal is here, which states (among other things) … Read more