Richard MacManus

Richard MacManus is a strategist and analyst focused on the Agentic Web: how AI agents discover, understand, and interact with websites and digital products. His work builds on more than two decades as an independent web analyst, advisor, and journalist — from founding ReadWriteWeb to consulting for startups, media companies, and tech firms.

Day 5 – and I am updating my novel online now

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I’ve decided to go the whole hog and post my novel online. There are a variety of reasons for this. One is that posting excerpts would mean it would be read out of context. If I’m prepared to post excerpts, I may as well just tell the whole story. Oh and another reason is that … Read more

Day 4

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8,120 words. I’m wondering whether to post excerpts online. Hmmm. Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)

Day 3

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6,086 words. Had to struggle to reach this. Started at 8.30pm and finished about 11.10pm. Man this is hard work and I’m only 3 days in. 27 more days to go! The good news is I’m still working at 2,000 words per day, but I suspect I’m going to have to put in a couple … Read more

Day 2

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4,062 words, so I’m keeping pace with the 2000 words per day goal I’ve set myself. I notice I’m currently first amongst the 15 or so Wellington writers 🙂 Enough writing for today. I’m off to watch the All Blacks hammer Wales in the rugby World Cup. Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)

Nanowrimo Day 1

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It’s just after 7pm on Saturday 1 November and I’ve finished my first day’s writing in the NaNoWriMo challenge. I managed 2,108 words today, which I’m really pleased with. It took me about 3 hours, a little over 1 hour in the morning straight writing (about 1,000 words) and in the evening I spent 1-2 … Read more

Richard’s 30-day Feat of Endurance

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I’ve now officially entered NaNoWriMo, which is an annual challenge to write a 50,000 word novel over 30 days. It kicks off on 1 November, which is one day away for me. I checked into the official NaNoWriMo website tonight and I was surprised to see that 14 other people from Wellington in New Zealand … Read more

Writing a novel in 30 days

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I’m one of those people that regularly says: “One day, I’m going to write a novel.” Well now may be my chance. NaNoWriMo is a an annual challenge to write a novel in 30 days, over the month of November. The novel must be at least 50,000 words, which is about 175 pages. I discovered … Read more

Will of its own

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I posted this on my linkblog, but I feel like publishing it here too. I heard some of Rautavaara’s Symphony Number 7 (Angel of Light) a few weeks ago, for the first time, and I was quite taken by the music. It reminded me of The Matrix. So anyway tonight I googled Rautavaara and discovered … Read more

Culture of Celebrity and Weblogs

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I judge the quality of a weblog by its IDEAS, but it seems some people equate quality with popularity. Is the ‘culture of celebrity’ that afflicts Western movies, television and radio creeping in to weblogs as well? These thoughts were prompted by the recent weblog discussion on power laws and how they relate to weblogs. … Read more

On Broadcasting

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The Two-Way Web is a very simple concept. It’s all about normal everyday people having a publishing platform on the Web. Sounds reasonable to me, but a thread on Many-to-Many this week has complicated the issue. Here’s my summary, based on how I first discovered and then tracked the thread (the process somehow seems important … Read more

Select Mode: Publisher

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David Weinberger recently wrote a weblog post entitled When blogs get really popular. In it he states that the line between blogging and email will become blurred. He says: “The word “blog” will expand to cover any linkable posting (a place) where a person gets to speak her mind more than once. If it’s more … Read more

Massaging the Medium

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Thanks to Peter Lindberg, for pointing me and others to a couple of Marshall McLuhan articles. But before I talk about those, here’s an overview of Marshall McLuhan from the Wikipedia: “Famous for coining the phrases “The medium is the message” and “the global village,” McLuhan was one of the early purveyors of the sound … Read more

The road to XHTML and tableless CSS designs

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I’ve been threatening to write an article about XHTML for a while now and so here goes. I’ll also talk about CSS and table-less web designs, because in the Web world right now XHTML and CSS are as hot a couple as Ashton and Demi (who may’ve broken up now, but I couldn’t think of … Read more

Is this the beginning of the Age of Topic-focused Blogs?

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October 15, 2003 I read with interest Matt Haughey’s essay Blogging for Dollars, where he relates his experiences running Google’s Adsense adverts on his TiVo-focused weblog, PVRblog. Matt is making a pretty penny running the Google ads on his TiVo blog and one of the main reasons why is that it is focused on a … Read more

Homage to Hyperlinks

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I’ve just finished transferring a bunch of links from Outlook to my linkblog. They are links I’ve been hoarding over the past few months, as ideas for future weblog articles or just for inspiration. I plan to use my linkblog to store all the ideas I harvest from the Web. Beats emailing myself, plus because … Read more