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
Next week we’ll publish Read/WriteWeb’s annual Best Web Companies and Innovators post. Also coming next week is the 2007 Web Trends post (I’d hoped to do it this week, but it’s now Saturday where I live and I’m exhausted!). Anyway I’d like to tap the minds of the R/WW community some more, before I write … Read more
I recently came across a web service called ZCubes, which is one of those browser-based portal apps that lets you do virtually everything under the sun – social networking, develop a website, browse the Web using a special built-in browser, create media (pictures, audio, video), add RSS feeds and gadgets, paint, handwriting, etc. It claims … Read more
This post is a short extract from the book Mobile Web 2.0, by Ajit Jaokar and Tony Fish. This week we’re focusing in on Mobile 2.0, which is basically the Mobile Web circa 2006. I’m much less familiar with the mobile world than the PC Web one, so I thought it’d be a good idea … Read more
While we’re on the subject of mobile 2.0 this week, one of my favorite web startups Sharpcast has just announced a new version of their Sharpcast Photos Mobile Edition. Sharpcast is a data sync service for consumers, allowing users to sync their data across PC, Web, mobile and other devices. Right now their flagship product … Read more
Last week I was briefed about a new product just released by Gotuit, called SceneMaker. It enables people to cut up and tag videos from platforms like YouTube or Metacafe. SceneMaker essentially allows users to embed e.g. a YouTube video in a Gotuit page, then add metadata around it. I was impressed with the usablity … Read more
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus. We wrote recently about the renewed web browser war between Microsoft and Mozilla (and some other, smaller, usually very innovative players). Our theory is that in 2006 a lot of the ground work for a major battle was laid out. Microsoft launched a significant upgrade to … Read more
As a follow-up to our previous post covering the top Web Trends of 2006, we’d like to get your vote for Best Internet Bigco of 2006. Long-time R/WW readers will know that at the end of each year we write a post noting our top Web companies of the year. In 2005 the best bigco … Read more
It’s December already and so it’s about that time to reflect on what has happened in Web Technology during 2006 – and ponder what 2007 may bring. Over the next few weeks Read/WriteWeb is going to publish some in-depth posts analyzing the trends and new products we’ve seen in 2006, as well as musing on … Read more
Later today Firefox will begin broadcasting, for the first time, four “fan-produced” commercials on prime time television. Initially the ads will only run in the San Francisco and Boston regions, but this will be expanded over time. The 4 video ads are a sampling of approximately 300 clips which were submitted to Mozilla’s Firefox Flicks … Read more
Spotted on the Google homepage today, using the IE browser, was this blazing advertisement for Firefox: (click image for full screenshot) While Google has advertised Firefox on its homepage before, it was a co-promotion of Firefox with the Google Toolbar. This current advertisement is for Firefox alone. But what does “Optimized for Google” mean??! The … Read more
Adam Carstens from the Attention Company emailed today to tell me about some new research they’ve just published. It’s a report entitled “Out There” and surveys the attitudes of people who participate in online communities. Here is the report as a PDF. I’d not heard of them before, but the Attention Company is made up … Read more
Web metrics firm Compete has an interesting post, outlining the top 20 websites (for US traffic). According to Compete, all 20 of them got over 20 million unique visitors in October 2006. Here is the chart: A couple of people noted in the comments that if you add Microsoft’s 4 top 20 properties together (msn.com, … Read more
While looking through Mary Meeker’s 2006 Web 2.0 Summit presentation, I was struck by the figures on page 19: “Peer-to-Peer (P2P) traffic was 60% (and rising) of Internet traffic in 2004, with BitTorrent accounting for 30% of traffic, per CacheLogic”. You can definitely see why this is the case, as P2P is normally used to … Read more
Today Microsoft released a beta of Live Search Books, its competitor to Google Book Search. The content inside Live Search Books isn’t that modern – it basically only includes out-of-copyright books. As the Live Search team noted, this release “makes tens of thousands of out-of-copyright books available from our library scanning initiative, including books from … Read more
Online video sharing sites are a dime a dozen these days, but a newly launched one caught my eye this week. Coull.tv promises to enable users to search inside videos – to find specific segments within a video that they want to view – as well as interact with “moving objects” inside the video. You … Read more