Web & AI Analyst
Richard MacManus 
I’ve been thinking lately about what value long-form writing has in the current internet era, which is dominated by a combination of video (e.g. YouTube), images (e.g. Instagram), ‘in the moment’ multimedia (e.g. Snapchat, TikTok) and the black and white opinions prevalent on social media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook). There are two key aspects of the … Read more
Website builders are one of the staple products of the internet. From Geocities in 1994, to Blogger in 2004, to Squarespace in 2014, to Gatsby in 2020, these tools continue to occupy a central place on the web. However, one of these things is not like the other… You can draw a straight line between … Read more
The relational database is still the world’s most used category of database, but its popularity trend line has been flat for a number of years now. Meanwhile other, more cloud native, types of database systems are trending upwards. It’s particularly noticeable with NoSQL database systems of varying flavors, like document stores (MongoDB), key-value (Redis), and … Read more
In my previous column, I wrote about how the “serverless” trend has abstracted away the infrastructure layer for application developers. Well the same thing is happening to databases, via Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) solutions like Amazon Aurora, MongoDB Atlas, Azure SQL Database and Redis Cloud Essentials. In its report on DBaaS vendors last year, analyst firm Forrester … Read more
A writer’s role is to build something thoughtful and/or delightful that is of value to people. It should help readers do their jobs, or help them understand the world, or help them cope with the world (by providing entertainment or comfort). Would that qualify as a “builder” in Marc Andreessen’s eyes?
Serverless is a growing trend in cloud computing, and it’s leading to a quiet revolution in how we mix and match data across the internet. The name itself is a misnomer because physical servers still exist (way down the stack, in massive data centers located in places like Nevada and Oregon). But in the serverless … Read more
I’ve been working at The New Stack for five weeks now, and am enjoying it more than any other job I’ve had since ReadWriteWeb. A big part of that is due to the team of people I’m working with, who have been generous with their time and knowledge, and welcoming. But I’m also feeling energized … Read more
In a guest post on The New Stack last week, Spectro Cloud‘s Tina Nolte wrote about the state of cloud computing in the current era of containers and Kubernetes (which she termed “Cloud 2.0”). I found her comments on how applications have changed to be particularly intriguing. In Cloud 2.0: “Your app looks different. It … Read more
Life in a time of pandemic, and updates about my new job and the status of my writing projects.
If the 2000s was when networking evolved on the internet (I called this the read/write era, others named it ‘Web 2.0’), and the 2010s was all about the compute layer, then the 2020s will see a revolution in the data layer. That’s according to DataStax Chief Strategy Officer Sam Ramji, who outlined his vision at … 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