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
Just kidding… but now that I have your attention, here are some interesting Web Tech tidbits: Amazon aStore is a new product from Amazon that enables you “to build a dedicated shopping area that can be embedded within, or linked to from, your website.” Mitch Ratcliffe and Nick Carr have examples and good thoughts on … Read more
I recently had the pleasure of talking to Opera‘s Chief Technology Officer Håkon Wium Lie. We spoke about Microsoft’s latest web browser IE7 and Håkon was harshly critical of it, as well as Microsoft’s past history with CSS and web standards. Bear in mind that Opera competes with IE and also that Håkon has a … Read more
With all this talk of the Web as a platform, it’s worth taking a closer look at what web apps are using Firefox as their platform. Firefox is regarded as the best Web browser in terms of extensions – i.e. small browser add-ons which modify or add to existing functionality. It has hundreds of add-ons, … Read more
Recently a new personalized start page product was announced, Webwag. In the comments to my post about Webwag, several people expressed their view that start pages are not a viable business. Personally I think start pages have plenty of opportunities to make money, despite (and sometimes because of) competition from Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. An … Read more
Turkey is next in this R/WW series on top international Web apps. It’s the 9th country I’ve profiled so far – the others have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain and China. For the following information on Turkey, I have Emre Sokullu to thank (also Honor Gunday for info on his web … Read more
Lately there’s been an increasing buzz about Web Office, something which I’ve been writing about for some time now. Red Herring magazine wrote an article with the provocative headline 17 MS Office Killers. While it would be quite a story if Microsoft did get usurped by a Web-based Office, the reality is that Microsoft will … Read more
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus. In this post, we survey a range of client applications which utilize the new web platform. This is a follow-up to our Web Platform Primer post a few days ago, in which we explained the building blocks of the new Web infrastructure: The Web Computing Platform … Read more
Despite all the broohaha over whether Spaces is the biggest blog service on the planet, it’s apparent that Windows Live is making an impact on the Web. After being around for less than a year, Alexa now ranks Live.com (and all its sub-domains) as the 10th biggest property on the Web. And yet it doesn’t … Read more
Amazon has just released a companion product to its online storage solution S3. With a name almost as surreal as Mechanical Turk (which is Amazon’s collective intelligence service), the new ‘compute’ service is called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. It all sounds like a Terry Gilliam movie, but it is Amazon at its innovative best once … Read more
China is next in my series on top international Web apps. If you haven’t been following, the other countries I’ve profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia and Spain. As this series has gone on, the comments have become as important as the posts – perhaps moreso. I’m hoping this … Read more
At the Microsoft TechEd conference in Auckland on Monday, I got a chance to sit down with George Moore – GM for the Windows Live Developer Platform. He is of course based in Redmond, but was over in NZ for TechEd. I started off by asking George about the “largest blogging service on the planet” … Read more
I can’t resist posting an excerpt from the Tim Berners-Lee podcast with IBM. This should hopefully put the matter of ‘what is web 2.0’ to rest, permanantly: LANINGHAM: “You know, with Web 2.0, a common explanation out there is Web 1.0 was about connecting computers and making information available; and Web 2 is about connecting … Read more
Google’s just announced a potentially significant update to its Google Base product, by releasing a data API for it. This essentially means Google is opening up Google Base, their database of structured content and home for many different verticals currently (jobs, vehicles, classified). The official blog post states: “We’re excited to announce the availability of … Read more
IBM has a podcast with Tim Berners-Lee. In a conversation with Scott Laningham of IBM developerWorks, Sir Tim discusses his early history with the Web, opportunities and challenges of the present, emerging technologies, and of course the semantic web. Reading news on your mobile device – Another Web inventor, Dave Winer of RSS fame, is … Read more
Webwag is a new personalized start page set to be released at the end of this month. According to E-consultancy.com, it’s the latest creation of ex-Google France chief Franck Poisson – who says it “will move out of beta on August 28” and be officially announced in early September. More from E-Consultancy.com: “According to Poisson, … Read more