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
Mary Jo Foley from ZDNet has done an excellent analysis of Microsoft’s Windows Live brand. Her conclusions are quite damning of Microsoft’s marketing department: “Problem No. 1: Live isn’t a consistently applied term: Sometimes it refers to services (like Windows Live Messenger), sometimes to desktop applications (a k a Windows Live Search Preview), and sometimes … Read more
The oddly-named 1dawg is the latest of hundreds of hopefuls to ride the online video wave. 1dawg’s differentiating factor is that it provides a free video conversion service to a variety of mobile devices. It’s a seemingly minor thing to do, but in the current era mobile devices often use incompatible media formats – and … Read more
This week’s poll relates to a somewhat controversial NY Times article over the weekend, which suggested that Silicon Valley is more likely to create innovative and successful tech products than elsewhere in the world. Obviously Silicon Valley has a lot going for it – it’s a hub for smart Web technologists, it’s swimming in VC … Read more
Later today Mozilla is launching an upgrade to its Add-Ons website. Add-ons are extensions to the Firefox browser and Mozilla is aiming to make them more accessible to mainstream users with this upgrade. Last week I spoke with Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s Director of Ecosystem Development and “add-ons guru”, about the new add-ons upgrade and also … Read more
– Microsoft Announces Three New Windows Live Products for Mobile Devices; along with the official release of Windows Mobile 6, Microsoft has announced 3 new Live products – Live Search for Windows Mobile, Live Search for Java, and Windows Live for Windows Mobile (a portal-type offering for mobile including e-mail, instant messaging, search and Live … Read more
An interesting tidbit came out of the recent Foo Camp New Zealand (which unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend). Robert O’Callahan from Mozilla, who is based in NZ but drives the rendering engine of Mozilla/FireFox, spoke about how Firefox 3 will deliver support for offline applications. This is significant because you’ll be able to use … Read more
Latvia is a small country in Northern Europe, next to Estonia, Lithuania, Russia and Belarus. It has a population of 2.3 million, around 38% of whom have Internet access. The ethnicity of the population (Latvians 60%; Russian 30%) is reflected in the small internet market, because most local web sites and apps have 2 versions … Read more
Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Top Web News All of the big Web companies were in the news this week, but probably the one that made the most impact (as usual) was Apple. Steve Jobs is the master of getting attention, and his call for record companies to … Read more
TVTonic is billing itself as “The Internet Channel”. There are plenty of companies muscling into that market currently (the Amazon/TiVO partnership being the latest example), but TVTonic seems more focused on being a subscription service for video podcasts. Essentially they are trying to become a TV station for user-generated or ‘amateur’ content (and a bit … Read more
– Is that a pipe in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?; as expected, geeks (myself included) are drooling over Yahoo Pipes, the new RSS Remix service. Indeed the demand has caused some outages. I particularly recommend the following coverage: O’Reilly Radar (although “milestone in the history of the internet” is … Read more
French startup Zlio.com, a service that enables any Internet user to start a virtual store, has just launched in the US and also has plans for a UK version. It’s a free template-based system and you select the products you want to sell from a list of pre-approved merchants. There are 75 merchants in France, … Read more
RSS feed remixing has been a pet topic of mine for quite some time, so tonight it was a pleasure to discover Yahoo’s new Pipes service (hat-tip Thejesh). It’s a beta service from Yahoo and the name, which pays tribute to Unix pipes, betrays that it’s designed for geeks and early adopters to experiment with. … Read more
– Microsoft to Support OpenID; details are sketchy at this point, but Microsoft looks likely to utilize OpenID (the open, decentralized identity system) in some of its products. Brady Forrest has more info at O’Reilly Radar. If this turns out to be true, it’ll be a huge step forward and will put pressure on Yahoo … Read more
Yet another social network launched publicly today, but this one called Change.org caught my eye for a couple of reasons. Firstly it’s for a great cause – enabling people to form communities around social issues like global warming and Net Neutrality. But it’s also a very well designed site that makes excellent use of ‘web … Read more
Rather than spending the night writing posts, I’ve been wrestling with CSS and various other design issues – the result is a new menu and content tab structure for Read/WriteWeb. The design work on all the tabs was done by the amazing Mike Rundle (he also did the logo a couple of months ago). There … Read more