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
NewsGator announces user base milestones; Newsgator is something of a quiet revolution these days. It isn’t announcing flashy features like Google Reader or Yahoo Pipes, but today it announced that more than one million people use NewsGator’s consumer RSS solutions, and its RSS platform is accessed over 10 million times per day by users of … Read more
At the Software 2007 conference on Tuesday in San Jose CA, on-demand document management provider ShareMethods will announce the launch of an open standards Web Office suite called ShareOffice. The company says it is the world’s first open standards online office suite. What’s more, ShareOffice is an excellent example of using best-of-breed Web Office apps … Read more
Today we published a detailed analysis of search innovation techniques by Nitin Karandikar. The post is long, but well worth reading if you are interested in where search is headed. To complement the post, we’re running a poll asking which of the 4 categories of search innovation that Nitin identified, do you think is key … Read more
Last week’s Read/WriteWeb poll asked what you thought of Silverlight, Microsoft’s newly improved rich internet app plug-in that was launched to (unusually) rave blog reviews at MIX on Monday. Some people even said that Silverlight leaves Adobe’s Flash technology in the dust, which is a big claim to make given that Flash is still extremely … Read more
Well it’s been another great trip to the USA! I’ve visited San Francisco (for Web 2.0 Expo), Las Vegas for MIX (courtesy of Microsoft New Zealand) and finally a couple of days in Los Angeles (just to see the sights!). Tonight I head back to New Zealand, getting set for full-time blogging again on Monday. … Read more
All the buzz here at Microsoft MIX in Vegas is rightly about Silverlight, but one other impressive demo I came across was a Vista gadget (a.k.a. widget) for Disney. Entertainment and Devices Division President Robbie Bach was on the main stage yesterday, talking about marketing Microsoft’s connected entertainment services. One of the case studies wheeled … Read more
The announcement last night of iGoogle (the new name for Google Personalized Homepage), Gadget Maker and other localization features, shows that Google is ramping up its personalization efforts once again. Google Blogoscoped has excellent coverage from the Google Personalization Workshop, held yesterday at Mountain View for a select group of local bloggers. In this post … Read more
As noted in our coverage of Ray Ozzie’s MIX keynote this morning, Microsoft has released a number of significant upgrades to its Silverlight product. Silverlight is essentially a competitor to Adobe’s Flash, in that enables developers to create interactive web apps. It’s officially described as “a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of … Read more
I was fortunate enough to be invited to a blogger lunch with Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie and General Manager of Client and Web Platform & Tools Scott Guthrie. The discussion was mostly developer focused, but right at the end I managed to get a question in about Microsoft’s strategy for IE and live.com. … Read more
I’m at the MIX conference in Las Vegas, courtesy of Microsoft New Zealand. Ray Ozzie has just completed his keynote speech, in which he delivered a more refined version of his ‘integrated Web/Desktop’ vision. He talked about how the best solutions are “integrated solutions”, meaning integrated Web, desktop and mobile. He talked about RIAs and … Read more
I’m on holiday all this week and during that time Josh Catone will be Guest Editor of Read/WriteWeb. You may remember Josh from such posts as Internet Killed The Television Star and Crowdsourcing: A Million Heads is Better than One. Josh is a talented writer, as well as being co-founder of the web’s largest community … Read more
Yesterday, 20 April, was the 4th anniversary of Read/WriteWeb’s first official post (although I first tinkered with blogging in March 2002). It’s amazing how much has happened in the last 4 years. A common question I get when I meet industry people is: how did you start R/WW? The short version is I started writing … Read more
Post Web 2.0 Expo, time to get back to work and thank our sponsors. Also of course thanks to our readers and writers! Read/WriteWeb’s sponsors are: Wild Apricot is bringing web 2.0 to non-profits. It offers membership database, event and website management for non-profits, clubs and associations. Zoho is a leading Web Office suite. I … Read more
Just as it’s become the custom for Tim O’Reilly to open the Web 2.0 conference keynotes with a fireside chat with Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, and then later for John Battelle to interview a Google exec (it used to be Sergey Brin, but now Eric Schmidt has taken over that task), it’s becoming Read/WriteWeb’s custom … Read more