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 Read/WriteWeb Job Board has now been combined with the Job Boards at two popular Web Business blogs, VentureBeat and Alarm:Clock. This means that when you post a job to the R/WW Job Board, it now displays on VentureBeat and Alarm:Clock as well as Read/WriteWeb. I’m not sure what numbers the other two blogs do, … Read more
At the end of January we wrote about a new service called Imagini Friends, which is a social network that calculates your “VisualDNA” and uses it to find other people that match. At the time, it reminded me of the personality tests you find in magazines like Vogue. Well it looks like Imagini has recently … Read more
At SXSW there was a panel entitled ‘Using RSS for Marketing’ (our coverage here from Sean Ammirati). Mick Liubinskas, from group communications product Tangler, left a good comment on our post: “RSS is a big topic of discussion around Tangler. Obviously we want to do it, but there’s doing it and there’s doing it well. … Read more
The mashups of our Top 100 Alternative Search Engines list continue! The Name Inspector, a fun and interesting blog run by a PhD in Linguistics, has done a linguistic analysis of the 100 search engine names on the list. His conclusion is that “the search for search engine names has drawn on some creative linguistic … Read more
While the serious talk today is about Freebase, a new next-gen search engine from Danny Hillis, it’s the end of the week and so time for a bit of fun. Author of the popular Top Alternative Search Engines list, Charles Knight, flicked me an email this morning with an example of a weird alt search … Read more
Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Top Web News Earlier this week we reported that Yahoo’s mobile social networking experiment Mixd had closed, after two months of testing. Actually it had shut down at the end of February, but it wasn’t noticed by bloggers at the time. What certainly … Read more
ShoppingPath.com is launching the beta version of its shopping comparison service. A preview of the ShoppingPath technology is located (for some reason) at the domain www.CrispyShop.com. What caught my eye was its unique, ipod-like, product comparison UI. It’s a mix of Ajax and Flash and is quite interesting… maybe even compelling. Here is a screenshot, … Read more
I wondered how long it would take before Pageflakes responded to the new-look My Yahoo beta, given that the sharing and ‘pages’ features in My Yahoo beta are very similar to what Pageflakes has already done. Sure enough, the following quote by new Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen was just emailed my way. And actually Dan … Read more
Hot on the heels of My.Netscape’s personalized homepage makeover, Yahoo has announced a new version of its own long-running personalized homepage, My Yahoo. It will at first be a private beta, with a limited number of users being offered a beta account at http://cm.my.yahoo.com/upgrade. Yahoo’s plan is to gather feedback from those early users and … Read more
Today I was invited to TVNZ’s headquarters in Auckland, along with several other local bloggers, to check out their new web-based television on demand service – called TVNZ ondemand and due to be launched later this month. It will have a mix of free (ad supported) and premium content; the latter may only be viewed … Read more
MyStrands, a music discovery and social networking site that covers the PC, mobile and physical worlds (see our profile in January), has released an interesting new recommendations feature. It uses the MyStrands Public APIs (called OpenStrands) to link their social music recommendations to Wikipedia information. Essentially it’s a mashup of MyStrands music recommendations with artist … Read more
OpenID has gained two more high profile Internet company supporters. WordPress announced their support today and also Chris Messina did a bit of snooping and discovered that 37Signals support is nigh. These two organizations join Digg, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, LiveJournal, MediaWiki, and others in their support of OpenID. There are still gaps – e.g. even … Read more
Not content with re-making the Netscape.com portal into a Digg clone, the Netscape 2.0 crew are at it again – this time with a new version of My.Netscape. Tomorrow (Tuesday US time) it will release “a Beta of the next generation My.Netscape”. The Netscape blog states: “My.Netscape will retain its identity as a personalized homepage, … Read more
Red Herring is reporting that AOL founders Steve Case and Ted Leonsis have invested $5.5-million, as a second round investment, into widget syndication platform Clearspring. Alex profiled ClearSpring back in November and other widget platforms we’ve covered before on Read/WriteWeb include Snipperoo, Widgetbox, Fox’s SpringWidgets and MuseStorm. In a recent post, VC Brad Feld says … Read more
After a two-month pilot, Yahoo’s Mixd mobile service has closed down. Mixd first came to light in November last year. It was a group mobile messaging tool for the youth market and had an experimental, trendy design. Currently the Mixd page has some farewell text on it and a pointer to the much more conservative … Read more