Richard MacManus

To follow-up on my rather bold prediction for RSS in my previous post: “in the not too distant future, more people will subscribe to topic/tag/remix feeds than feeds of actual people.” One of the reasons I think this may eventuate is that blogging is and always will be a minority sport (as I’ve referred to … Read more

Amazon DevCon is happening right now and happily the Amazon Web Services Blog is blogging it in “near-real-time” (hat-tip to Greg Linden for linking to it). I haven’t browsed through all the notes from day 1 yet, but I feel compelled to post about Rael Dornfest’s speech on the subject of “remix: beyond rip, mix, … Read more

Here are some notes taken from John Doerr’s talk at the Web 2.0 Conference, held October 2004 in San Francisco. Thanks to IT Conversations for recording it! John Doerr is a well-known venture capitalist, who apparently had the foresight to back Google in 1999 when few others did. His Web 2.0 speech had a lot … Read more

Pegasus News is a self-styled “Journalism 2.0” company that I’ve been enjoying reading about. In fact the whole “grassroots journalism” movement is interesting, because there are a lot of experienced journalists throwing themselves into the Read/Write Web (the philosophy, not my blog) with incredible gusto. Jay Rosen and Dan Gillmor are two in particular that … Read more

Looks like the first salvo has been fired in what is sure to be an ongoing controversy over contextual advertising using RSS. Martin Schwimmer, a trademark lawyer, has asked Bloglines to remove his RSS feed from their service – and Bloglines has complied. Schwimmer publishes his website using a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution licence and … Read more

Time for a look back at the week that was in Web 2.0. In no particular order… 1. Gizmodo‘s 4-part interview with Bill Gates ended with Bill insisting that DRM is a good thing because it protects your medical records (or something like that). In part one of the interview, Gates mentioned blogging – said … Read more

Internertnews.com quoted me in their article entitled Benchmark For RSS Client Market Share?, a news story covering Feedburner’s RSS Aggregator stats. It’s the first time I’ve been used in the media as a source, so I’m quite chuffed. They didn’t contact me, just quoted from my blog – which is fine by me. It’s a … Read more

Great news! Prompted by my December post about RSS Reader Market Share, Feedburner (the company I selected as the most promising Web 2.0 company of 2004/5) has just released their own RSS Aggregator stats. This is exactly what I asked for, because statistically the Feedburner data is much much bigger – and hence more statistically … Read more

I thought I’d trial a new feature on Read/Write Web, a weekly summary of news and views relating to Web 2.0 (Web as platform). Most of the links will be sourced from my linkblog, which btw I’m now managing with del.icio.us. So here are some highlights from this week: 1. Weblications is a must-read article … Read more

I mentioned before Christmas that I’m starting a new business and now’s the time to let you all know what it is. It’s a new business blogging company, called Weblog Solutions Ltd. It’s a 50/50 venture with another New Zealand blogger, who’s a bit shy about revealing his identity right now (but a lot of … Read more

Simon Waldman, Director of Digital Publishing for Guardian Newspapers, writes: “Gizmodo gets handed an interview with Bill Gates. Good for them, I say – and a smart move by Microsoft. Now here’s a big challenge to traditional media: yes, anyone can run a blog and call themselves a reporter, but ‘access’ is operated almost on … Read more

One of my favourite articles of 2004 was a transcript of a speech by Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press. In it he said that “…content will be more important than its container in this next phase [of the Web]”. Why? Because “killer apps, such as search, RSS and video-capture software such as Tivo … Read more

Congratulations to The Robot Co-op for releasing their new goal-setting social software app, 43 Things, in time for New Year resolutions. I’ve only added a few things to my account so far. I’m still working out the balance between private and public goals, but once I sort that out I’ll add more things. Another observation … Read more

Time for my weekly plug for my sponsors Marqui. I’ve been following what the other paid bloggers are doing and a lot of them are writing up the stories that are being “fed” to us. That’s a sensible tactic, so I feel a bit guilty for not going with the flow and doing the same. … Read more

In 2005 I’ll be sharpening my blog’s focus some more, onto the topic of Web 2.0. I’ll explore what Web 2.0 means in detail in later posts, but for now a quick definition of Web 2.0 is: using the Web as a platform. A good way for me to launch into the new year is … Read more