Writer & Tech Journalist
Richard MacManus 
Every December going back to 2004, I’ve done an end-of-year review of internet technology trends. This year focuses on what I call “culture-tech”: digital technology that is transforming the cultural industries.
In this third and final part of my audio vs text series, I examine where podcasts fit into the cultural content landscape. The thesis of this series is that audio formats, such as podcasting and audiobooks, have in some ways replaced textual formats like blogs and print books. Text content is certainly not dead, of course, but … Read more
In last week’s feature article, I analyzed the rise of audio formats in comparison to the decline in print formats. Specifically: podcasts and audiobooks are on a bull run in the content market, whereas blogs, print books and ebooks continue their bearish tendencies. In the following two articles in this audio vs text series, I’ll take a deeper dive … Read more
On The Bill Simmons Podcast this month, author Malcolm Gladwell said something that startled me: the audiobook version of his latest book, Talking to Strangers, was outselling the hard cover after the first week on sale. He mentioned this was also happening with the books of Jordan Peterson, a middle-aged self help author who’s become enormously popular with younger generations due to … Read more
Last week I argued that blogs, Tumblr and email newsletters can offer an alternative to the Black Mirror world of social media we currently live in. In particular, that we can build this new world – the blogosphere 2.0 – around cultural content. Once again I have to caution: I don’t see this as competing with social media, because … Read more
The following post is my argument for a new type of social networking built around cultural content. While blogs, Tumblr and email newsletters cannot compete with social media for popular attention, we can build an alternative, more thoughtful, world with these tools.
Online gaming, virtual reality experiences and mixed reality apps are among the fastest growing parts of the digital economy. But are they what we’d traditionally label as “culture”? A new report argues that not only should these “interactive media” be talked about in the same breath as movies, music and books, they’re also essential to … Read more
In this week’s free weekly Cybercultural newsletter, I look at the problem of archiving cultural content from magazines, blogs, musicians and video gamers – and why it matters. Have you ever had any of these issues lately while trying to access content? You wrote a blog in the early to late 2000s, but it’s long … Read more
The big social media companies have rightfully come under immense pressure over the past week, in the wake of the Christchurch terror attack. But one question continues to bother me: why were Facebook and YouTube so ineffective when it came to shutting down the terrorist’s live stream and the dispersal of the video after? Over … Read more
After the tragedy in Christchurch last Friday, serious questions are being asked of the world’s largest social media companies. Why was the killer able to live stream this appalling act on Facebook for 17 minutes? Why couldn’t YouTube and Twitter prevent copies of the video from being propagated on their global networks? Why did Reddit … Read more
The “gig economy” has its drawbacks, as highlighted recently by Newsroom Pro managing editor Bernard Hickey, but it’s also an unavoidable part of today’s employment landscape. Especially for millennials and Generation Z, two generations that grew up in the internet era – and now have to earn a living in it. I’ve questioned aspects of … Read more
Electric scooters have been all the rage in parts of New Zealand over the past six months, with Lime scooters clogging up both footpaths and media headlines. But we could soon be seeing more electric moped bikes on our streets too, if kiwi startup UBCO has its way. UBCO is a rapidly expanding business, and … Read more
A recent Government report into the digital economy has been criticized for focusing too much on global giants like Google and Uber, and barely mentioning New Zealand’s leading tech companies. The report, co-written by the NZ and Australian Productivity Commissions, claims that both NZ and Australia are minor players in the global innovation market. “The … Read more
Digital billboards are now an unlikely arm of the media business, if New Zealand’s own MediaWorks is any indication. Late last year, MediaWorks – which runs the Three tv network and popular radio brands like The Edge and More FM – acquired the New Zealand arm of Australian out-of-home advertising business, QMS Media. It was … Read more
Podcasting is a version of radio optimized for the internet era, but it’s still a relatively small market. The US podcasting industry earned $314 million in revenue in 2017, according to a report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PwC. But that pales in comparison to the US radio industry, which earned $22.1 billion … Read more