Richard MacManus

DISCLOSURE: This post is part of my sponsorship arrangement with Marqui. Curious to see what effect the ‘paid for blogging’ program is having on Marqui’s search positioning, I googled the word “marqui” and discovered that my blog is ranked number 4 in the results (as of this writing)… ahead of the official marqui.com website at … Read more

Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg has some predictions for 2005. The first 4 are of great interest to me, so I thought I’d list them here along with some brief comments from moi. Plus at the end of this post, a hint of what I’ll be up to in 2005. 1. Longhorn is no longer … Read more

Thanks to a link from Robert Scoble (who is always looking out for his readers, bless him), my issue with Technorati not indexing my blog came to the notice of Technorati Chief Dave Sifry. To his credit, Dave immediately jumped onto the case and Kevin Marks solved it today. I noticed others have been having … Read more

What, my links not good enough for you Technorati? 😉 I say that with a wink, but to be honest I’m pissed off with Technorati. My main weblog, Read/Write Web, is not being indexed there and so none of my outbound links show up in Technorati. Therefore nobody would know I’m linking to them, if … Read more

Russell Beattie’s just released a service called Mobdex, which serves up eBooks onto mobile phones. I had the pleasure of getting a sneak preview of Mobdex near the end of September, after Russ spotted a post about the Mobile Web on my blog and emailed me. So I’ve been waiting for him to release it … Read more

DISCLOSURE: This post is part of my sponsorship arrangement with Marqui. I am being paid US$800 per month for 3 months, to post once a week about Marqui. It’s that time of the week again, when I give my thanks to Marqui for sponsoring my blog for 3 months. Thanks! Anyway I thought I’d have … Read more

Jason Kottke on web magazines: “Before weblogs ruled the realm, a typical way to publish content online was in a Web magazine format. Suck, Feed, Netly News, Smug, Stating the Obvious, etc.” Jason followed up in a later comment with this: “Suck articles were finished and “professional”, which is what’s missing (I think) from my … Read more

Back in the early 90’s I used to read William S. Burroughs books and for a while I was quite taken with his “cut-up” method of writing. The cut-up technique is a specialised literary form in which a text is cut up at random and rearranged to create a new text (ref: Wikipedia). I think … Read more

There’s a nice meme just started, asking people to list their Top 24 posts of 2004 (via). I decided to check out my web stats and dig out the most-visited posts of 2004 for Read/Write Web. They may not necessarily be “the best” posts in terms of quality, but the people have spoken and the … Read more

DISCLOSURE: This post is part of my sponsorship arrangement with Marqui. I am being paid US$800 per month by Marqui from 1 December 2004 – 28 February 2005, to post once a week about Marqui. OK, there’s been a lot of discussion about the merits or otherwise of the Marqui project – much of it … Read more

I came across PubSub’s LinkRank feature for the first time today. It’s an interesting new measurement… Here is the official blurb, comparing it to Google PageRank: “Unlike Google’s PageRank system, LinkRanks are not iterative. Rather, we base LinkRanks on a simple formula that only looks at local links – links which are within one or … Read more

What if I told you that, starting 1 December, I will be paid US$800 per month for 3 months to write 1 blog post per week about a company called Marqui. Would you think I was “tainting” the blogosphere? Would you accuse me of being a sellout? Would you doubt my integrity? Hmm, well that’s … Read more

Listened to the latest Gillmor Gang Show, with Jonathan Schwartz as guest. Sun’s Schwartz is one very smart cookie and a very effective speaker. The following quote in particular stood out for me: “We [Sun] want a world where there are tons and tons of interesting, interactive iPod equivalents – where people are doing interesting … Read more

A couple of weeks ago I was bitching that none of my favourite authors had their most recent books available in eBook format. Well as luck would have it, Tom Wolfe just released his new novel I am Charlotte Simmons and it is available as an eBook! I went to 3 sources to check out … Read more

This is a copy of a suggestion I’ve just sent to Bloglines Support. It was inspired by a Feedburner Forums thread I started a few days ago, regarding whether Feedburner was counting all of my RSS feeds in their statistics. Turned out they weren’t and there was indeed an issue “with online aggregators when you … Read more