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
Read/WriteWeb has 1 free ticket to give away for the Under The Radar Office 2.0 conference, to be held on March 23 at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View. More details at the Under The Radar blog. The free ticket will be presented to the winner of this caption contest. To enter, simply provide a … Read more
Netvibes, one of the leading ‘personalized homepage’ products on the market, today officially released its new version – nicknamed the “Coriander Edition”. This edition has been under discussion for the past month on the Netvibes blog, but today it is being officially launched. Incidentally Netvibes is now using the term “super-personalized homepage” to describe itself … Read more
Well here I am joining a Techmeme scrum 😉 The big news today is that Michael Arrington announced a CEO for Techcrunch – Heather Harde, who is currently the SVP of Mergers and Acquisitions at Fox Interactive Media. This really does prove that blogs can be big business – it’s a heck of an achievement … Read more
Every Friday afternoon PST, Read/WriteWeb publishes a Weekly Wrapup of news, reviews and analysis from the past week. I know a lot of people are too busy with their jobs to keep up with Web tech news on a daily basis, so the Weekly Wrapup is the perfect opportunity for those people to catch up … Read more
Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Analysis Posts Google Interview This week Read/WriteWeb finally got an interview with Google, something I’ve been wanting for a long time. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam operations, talked to me on the topic of next-generation search. Unfortunately I published it just … Read more
sphereit start 13 months ago Read/WriteWeb published a review post about the leading “meme trackers” – i.e. sites that cluster and filter the latest tech news. My conclusion at that time was that Techmeme came out on top, closely followed by Tailrank and Topix.net. My summary back then: “All in all, Memeorandum still comes out … Read more
With the proliferation of online video (yes there is more than just YouTube out there!), the opportunity has arisen for portal players that provide a ‘one stop shop’ for online video. One such service is PureVideo, which has just released some new features. In fact it almost has too many features, because it’s hard to … Read more
A new website called We Dig TV is transforming TV game shows and re-making them for the internet. The site converts tv programs and formats into Internet tv shows, making them interactive and a two-way Web experience. As of now they have adapted 4 classic TV game shows and optimised them for broadband use – … Read more
In yesterday’s post about Google, a follow-up to this week’s interview with Matt Cutts, we wrote that Google is still searching for a way to measure relevancy for video – and by extension a way to automatically insert contextual advertising around its YouTube videos. We think that the lack of an adequate “VideoRank” is the … Read more
Last Friday we posted about weird search engines. We got some good comments and found some new weird search engines to add to our list. Note that we mean weird in a good way – as in something a bit different. To remind you, here are the original ‘weird’ search engines: www.ufocrawler.com/search www.GhetoSearch.com www.omnipelagos.com www.wabbadabba.com … Read more
In yesterday’s interview with Matt Cutts from Google, on the topic of next-generation search, we touched on how Google is tackling the issue of indexing (and advertising around) online video. Matt implied that Google is looking for an equivalent to PageRank for online video: “…in the Web we have this notion of reputation – which … Read more
Spanning Sync v1.0, an application that provides two-way synchronization between Google Calendar and Apple iCal, has launched after seven months of development – including a four-month beta period. As The Unofficial Apple Weblog noted, Spanning Sync also syncs between multiple Macs and Google Calendar accounts, with iSync-compatible devices like iPods and mobile phones (iPhone too … Read more
In Read/WriteWeb’s interview with Matt Cutts of Google today, on the topic of next-generation search, the very last question I asked him was how Google is going about indexing video. It’s a big question, because with YouTube and other online video sites seemingly taking over the Web (as far as consumer content goes), video search … Read more
Last week I had the pleasure of interviewing the head of Google’s Webspam team, Matt Cutts. The topic of our conversation was Next-Generation Search. In my pitch to get an interview with someone at Google, I explained how Read/WriteWeb hasbeencoveringNext-Gensearcha lot and so it would (obviously) be great to get Google’s views on this topic! … Read more
The mashups of our Top Alternative Search Engines list continue! Charles Knight spotted a great post by the Search The Web 2.0 blog, which took the top 100 and attempted to rank them by market share. The reason for this ambitious undertaking was a comment that Charles made when we first published the list: “…people … Read more