Richard MacManus

“The only thing more perfect than reading is more reading,” declared Amazon in a TV advert for its new Kindle eReader device. At a self-hosted event in Santa Monica today, Amazon launched new versions of its eReader and tablet products. Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos spent over an hour on stage, extolling the virtues of … Read more

This week I’m exploring tools that help filter your Social Web experience. Yesterday I checked out Webicina, a medical news curation service. Today I’m re-visiting a service that has a much broader appeal, at least in terms of topics covered: reddit. The Condé Nast owned social news aggregator has become so popular that even the … Read more

This week I’m going to be exploring filtering tools on the Web, with a particular focus on general interest topics like health, politics and sports. The Web is often an overwhelmingly noisy environment. Even the best social media services – like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ – can quickly drown you in a deluge of real-time … Read more

Last Friday I did a presentation at The Project [R]evolution conference in Auckland, New Zealand. I presented on a topic I’ve been writing a lot about recently: the reimagination of publishing. I haven’t been this excited about innovation in Web publishing since the early, experimental days of blogging, when I started ReadWriteWeb circa 2002-03. In … Read more

As streams of information become more popular on the Web, we need better ways to consume and manage them. Apps that allow you to aggregate content from different sources – Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news websites and more – may become very popular. That’s if they can overcome the increasingly walled gardens of Facebook and Twitter. … Read more

One of the five reasons why Web publishing is changing is the emergence of streams of information. In other words, a constant flow of information ordered chronologically and (ideally) topically too. In the near future, the theory goes, it won’t matter where you enter content – a blog platform, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etcetera – because … Read more

This week I’m exploring why topic pages are getting traction on the social Web. But one potential flaw in topic pages is that they are typically closed networks. Wikipedia, The New York Times, Branch, Medium – these are all tightly controlled, essentially closed knowledge networks. Sure you can wrangle an invite to Branch, or eventually … Read more

Yesterday we outlined why topic pages are becoming increasingly popular on the Web, as a way to organize social or news content. As daily consumers of such content, we’re used to the chronological (and often real-time) ordering of updates from Facebook, Twitter, blogs and more. But the latest wave of Web publishing services, like Pinterest … Read more

Chronological and real-time consumption of content just doesn’t work anymore. It’s time for topic pages to add a layer of organization on top. In last week’s post, 5 Reasons Why Web Publishing is Changing (Again), we explained why online publishing is going through another sea change. One of those reasons was topical organization of content … Read more

Yesterday we outlined five reasons why Web publishing is undergoing a sea change, via new services like Medium, Branch, Svtle and App.net. In today’s post, we turn our attention to the readers. We’re all readers, in some capacity. So the changes we’re witnessing in publishing affect us all. Here’s what it will mean to you … Read more

We’re witnessing another sea change in Web publishing. From Pinterest at the beginning of this year to the launch this week of a new product from two Twitter founders, Medium, 2012 has been a year where the norms of publishing are being challenged. It wasn’t that long ago that Tumblr and WordPress were the cutting … Read more

Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone have been busy developing two new services, both of which were publicly launched this week by their incubator company The Obvious Corporation. Unfortunately, both products are read-only for most people right now. So first impressions will be muted – perhaps even mystified, since Medium has very little navigation. … Read more

App.net has so far raised nearly $800,000 in membership fees with the promise that it will be a non-commercial, user and developer-friendly version of Twitter. It’s off to a good start, with early adopters enthusiastically kicking the tires of App.net’s alpha service and (perhaps more importantly) its API. But there is still a lot of … Read more

Over the weekend, budding Twitter competitor App.net reached its funding goal of $500,000. Already the service has an alpha website and an API, allowing backers and hackers alike to play with it. As to be expected, the early users are geeky – and mostly male. It’s fun watching a nascent service find its legs. In … Read more

Yesterday we looked at how online media is covering the London 2012 Olympics. We gave our virtual gold medal to the New York Times, for its sleek design and muscular content. Today we review the major social media sites: Facebook, Twitter and Google+. To continue the Olympics theme, we award each of the three a … Read more