From ReadWriteWeb to the agentic 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
Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb, with the results of our poll at the end. Top Web News Much of the discussion in the blogosphere this week revolved around two pieces of big news. Firstly Google announced that it is beta testing a new CPA (Cost Per Action) online … Read more
We had a great response to the ETech Caption Contest, with the winner receiving a free ticket to O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference next week – March 26-29, in San Diego. And the winner is… [drum roll] Kevin Jones, with this caption: “You navigated through Vista’s new security and accessed MySpace! Good job!” Congratulations Kevin, you’ve … Read more
This week I spoke to Hakia founder and CEO Dr. Riza C. Berkan and COO Melek Pulatkonak. Hakia is one of the more promising Alt Search Engines around, with a focus on natural language processing methods to try and deliver ‘meaningful’ search results. Alex Iskold profiled Hakia for R/WW at the beginning of December and … Read more
Our current poll asks which ‘personalized homepage’ do you use? After a false start, the current results are very interesting. Google Personalized Homepage is most popular with 31%, followed by two of the innovative startups – Pageflakes 21% and Netvibes 20%. Interesting that two of the bigcos are lagging – My Yahoo 6% and Live.com … Read more
The big news today is News Corporation and NBC Universal launching what they claim will be “the largest Internet video distribution network ever assembled”, with AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo! as the site’s initial distribution partners. It will launch this summer (US). The benefits obviously work both ways – News Corp and NBC get 4 … Read more
One of the big pieces of news this week was Google announcing their CPA (Cost-Per-Action) product, or as they’re calling it – PPA (Pay-Per-Action). There are good analysis posts about the news from Techcrunch and Microsoft’s Don Dodge. It’s been expected for some time now that Google will move into CPA, as a lot of … Read more
Forrester Research has just released two reports concerning ‘web 2.0’ in the enterprise. Forrester recently surveyed 119 CIOs on the topic and their answers illustrate what IT honchos want’ and don’t want’ from social software technologies such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, and content tagging. According to the report entitled CIOs Want Suites … Read more
Earlier this week we gave away a free ticket to Office 2.0 and today we have a a free ticket to next week’s ETech to offer as a prize. ETech is O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference and it’ll be held next week, March 26-29, in San Diego. An important note about the prize – the Etech … Read more
NOTE: Please see important update about this week’s R/WW Poll below, on the topic of Personalized Homepages. We had to re-set it and so are asking for you to re-submit your vote. Today Google launched 6 new themes for its Google Personalized Homepage. The themes to choose from include: a beach, a city, a sweet … Read more
We had an awesome response to our caption contest on Monday – over 80 comments! The Under The Radar folks and myself had a tough choice deciding… but the winner of the free ticket to the Under The Radar Office 2.0 conference, to be held this Friday March 23 at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain … Read more
Allth.at was one of the 100 top alternative search engines in Charles Knight’s February list. It’s a search agent that allows you to define a search topic, then refine it with the use of filters, and finally subscribe to it via email or RSS. It’s similar in many respects to PubSub, the now defunct ‘future … Read more
One of the more innovative web apps around has just gotten another big injection of funds, and a new CEO to boot. Zopa describes itself as a “marketplace for Social Lending”, where people lend and borrow money with each other – sidestepping the middleman, i.e. banks. They recently advertised for jobs in their new America … Read more
Disclosure: Userplane is a sponsor of Read/WriteWeb Userplane, the provider of community web apps that was acquired by AOL in August last year, is today releasing Userplane Userlist – a Flash-based instant messaging app that you can integrate into web sites. Basically Userlist enables users on a site to view other users’ online status and … Read more
On Tuesday Yahoo will significantly expand the reach of their new mobile search product, Yahoo! oneSearch, by making it the default mobile Yahoo homepage at http://m.yahoo.com for US users. In effect this brings oneSearch, which Yahoo launched in January 2007, to the Mobile Web masses. The US masses anyway – it will be rolled out … Read more
Update: Unfortunately we have had to re-set the poll, 12 hours after it went live, due to some suspicious voting behavior. We have now blocking repeat voters by Cookie and IP address (previously it was only cookie). We apologize for the inconvenience, but please cast your vote again. With the release of Netvibes’ latest version, … Read more