Tech analyst, AI & the web
I founded the tech blog ReadWriteWeb in April 2003 and ran it until October 2012. During my time running the business, it was well known for its cutting edge content (“What’s next on the Web”) and its influential global audience. At its peak, RWW was ranked among the top ten blogs in the world by Technorati.
This category contains all of the articles I personally wrote for RWW, now archived on ricmac.org for easier browsing and search. If you’d like to explore the original context, you can also view a year-by-year archive with links to the Wayback Machine
The R/WW Weekly Wrapup is sponsored by: Another busy week of Web Tech. And you may’ve noticed a new daily voice on Read/WriteWeb – Josh Catone is now a lead writer here, so welcome aboard Josh! OK, here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to … Read more
Over the past few years, web usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s star has been waning. Ever since the web 2.0 trend started to become popular (around 2004 till now), Nielsen’s ‘keep it simple’ design philosophy has failed to ignite the new generation of designers. But it’s not the ‘keep it simple’ philosophy in general that is … Read more
WordPerfect Lightning, the beta Web/desktop hybrid “content aggregator” launched by Corel in late February, will announce tomorrow morning an integration with popular blog platform WordPress. There will also be new features added to the product itself. Corel is best known for its set of budget office applications, such as WordPerfect, Paint Shop Pro and CorelDraw. … Read more
Back in January, Alex Iskold reviewed a number of ‘web previews’ tools – including Browster, Cooliris, Snap and Sphere. A couple of others are iReader and Blogrovr, although the latter is more about delivering content than previewing it. We’ve reviewed several of these web previews products before – e.g. see our post about iReader. Essentially … Read more
We’re midway through the week and this week’s poll has thrown up some interesting results so far. We asked: among the big Internet companies/orgs, whose web app deployment platform do you like best? Frankly I was expecting Adobe and Microsoft to top the poll, as Apollo and Silverlight have gotten a great deal of attention … Read more
Tonight meebo is launching Meebo Rooms, a rich media chat room product that users can put on their blogs and websites. They can be private or public chat rooms, and can feature video content from sources such as youtube and NBC. Earlier today I spoke to Seth Sternberg, CEO and co-founder of meebo, about the … Read more
This week’s poll is based on our current feature post, Understanding Apollo. In that post, I attempted to provide an overview of Apollo for non-developers. At the end, I looked at the high level of how the big Internet companies are deploying web apps nowadays. Here’s what I wrote: It is a fiercely competitive market, … Read more
During my recent visit to the US, I popped into the Adobe office in San Francisco to find out more about Apollo – the company’s new RIA (Rich Internet Application) runtime and development platform. I sat down with Mike Chambers – Apollo Senior Product Manager, developer relations – to figure out what Apollo is all … Read more
Forrester has just released a new report on Enterprise RSS. Specifically it tackles the issue of information overload in the corporate environment, now that RSS feeds are an important source of information in the workplace. Also it covers how IT departments are becoming more interested in enterprise RSS solutions, particularly from 3 vendors who seem … Read more
Simply Google is an unofficial portal for Google apps and services. Charles Knight mentioned it in his original Top 100 Alt Search Engines List, as an example of how the famously sparse Google homepage could be enhanced. In Charles’ words: “Instead of squeezing through the keyhole in order to reach Google’s 37 search options, Simply … Read more
Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Apologies for missing last week’s wrapup, due to travel. Note that you can subscribe to the weekly wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email: Top Web News This week we saw a lot of action on the Web Office suite … Read more
Interesting posts recently from two people who have an important role in defining the future of the browser. Firstly, I missed it while I was in transit in the US, but Mozilla developer Alex Faaborg posted the slides of his presentation at the recent Web 2.0 Expo. They are fascinating and show clearly where Mozilla … Read more
Online radio station Last.fm is adding a video section to its site this week, enabling users to create their own personalised video channels – similar to how users can already create radio stations based on their music tastes. Last.fm is partnering with major and independent labels for this. The company also claims that the quality … Read more
Interesting reaction over at The Guardian blog to our post yesterday about the StartUp2.0 competition for European web 2.0 sites. Guardian blogger Jack Schofield said that he only recognized 1 out of the 15 finalists. Jack wrote: “What I find amusing is that I’ve only actually used — or even heard of — one of … Read more
RateItAll, a social network based around online reviews and opinions, has released a new distributed rating widget. It enables users to not only view (read) a widget, but to interact with it and enter data (write). The initial application for RateItAll’s read/write widget is a blog feedback badge, which is the first of many distributed … Read more