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
Disclosure: Eurekster is a sponsor of Read/WriteWeb Eurekster has quietly rolled out an interesting upgrade to their social search service, Swicki. Now users can contribute their own search answers to a swicki, if they feel they have expertise in the topic. This essentially makes Swicki into a ‘read/write’ search engine! The owner of the swicki … Read more
To usher in the new year, we’re very pleased to announce the new Read/WriteWeb Job Board – brought to you in association with JobThread. While there are a few prominent and excellent job boards run by other tech blogs, there are a couple of differentiating factors with ours: 1) It’s less expensive! $100 for a … Read more
Just before Christmas, Mozilla designer Alex Faaborg published some introductory posts on his blog about where Mozilla is headed with microformats. Quick background: Mozilla is of course the developer of the popular open source browser Firefox; and microformats are (in Alex’s words) “adding semantics to markup to take it from being machine readable to being … Read more
Written by Berislav Lopac and edited by Richard MacManus Croatia is a small market for any industry – and especially when it comes to the Internet. It has about 4.5 million citizens, but only 35% of them regularly used the Internet in 2005, according to a recent study by IDC. However, the same study tells … Read more
Last week we published a list of web technology predictions for 2007, along with a poll asking which trend you think will be *the* biggest of 2007. Social networks dominated the Web scene in 2006, so what will be the equivalent in 2007? We’ve had 1,235 votes so far (but we’ll leave the poll open … Read more
It’s a light posting week here on R/WW – but for those of you not out enjoying the xmas/new year break, here is a list of Read/WriteWeb’s most popular posts in 2006. This is according to our server logs. But honestly, you really should be reading a good book instead of blogs at this time … Read more
This is the third annual Best Web Companies round-up from Read/WriteWeb (ref: 2005 and 2004). This year we’re spreading it out over 2 separate posts and this is the second one – see yesterday’s post for Best BigCo of 2006. Best Web LittleCo It was a very hard decision this year, for a few reasons. … Read more
Yahoo has come up with a way to mix social networking with charities and non-profits. Called Yahoo! For Good, it has partnered with ‘charity aggregator’ Network for Good and launched a personalized Charity Badge – for people to put on their websites, social networks or email. To promote the initiative, Yahoo! will match the amount … Read more
This is the third annual Best Web Companies round-up from Read/WriteWeb (see 2005 and 2004). This year we’re spreading it out over 2 separate posts. In this post, we announce Best Bigco and the runners-up – with our special brand of analysis too. In our next post, we’ll announce Best Web LittleCo of 2006 and … Read more
Written by Richard MacManus, Ebrahim Ezzy, Emre Sokullu, Alex Iskold and Rudy De Waele. Also John Milan wanted to contribute, but unfortunately got caught up in the Seattle storm – so best wishes to John and all our Seattle readers. In our previous post we reviewed the Web trends of 2006, noting trends such as … Read more
Tonight I stumbled upon what appears to be a brand new User Interface for Ask.com. I was doing some searches on Ask.com, when I noticed a link in the top right asking me to try out something called Ask X. Screenshot below: When I clicked on the link, it regenerated my original query using a … Read more
Last week I was following the De-Portalization of the Internet thread, started by Fred Wilson and then extended by Keith Teare. I was struck by one observation in particular by Fred: “I don’t have the data to prove it, but my guess is if you looked at the percent of all pageviews that are generated … Read more
Popular social news site Digg has announced a number of new features in anticipation of the new year, including a beta podcasting service and enhanced video on the site. Digg says the aim of the new features is to make Digg a more inviting environment for new users, in line with Digg’s business imperative to … Read more
In a recent blog post, Wenzhi Lai of online listings company edgeio noted that their China operation – called mulu100 – has become the second largest source of traffic for edgeio. I was curious to know more about edgeio’s activities in China – and also to tap CEO Keith Teare’s brain about the Chinese Web … Read more
So Web 2.0 finally goes mainstream…. kind of. Time Magazine has named the Web-powered “You” as its coveted Person of the Year. In the accompanying articles, the term Web 2.0 is used and there’s talk of an Internet “revolution”. I think this is all great as a general recognition of the read/write Web – but … Read more