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 Animas Weblog has written a couple of interesting posts in response to Ebrahim Ezzy‘s Search 2.0 posts, featured on Read/WriteWeb recently (part 1 and part 2). In the first post, Animas frames his argument as a David vs Goliath struggle (the search 2.0 startups being, of course, David). Original image However in the Gospel … Read more
Engadget is providing superb coverage of the Apple World Wide Developer Conference, currently in progress in San Francisco. I’ll zero in on the bit that interested me the most – one of my hobby horses, widgets (mini web apps). At the conference Apple said there are currently 2500 widgets in Dashboard. They announced two enhancements … Read more
The latest Technorati State of the Blogosphere report shows that 39% of all blog postings are in english. Japanese is the second-most popular language, at 31% and China third with 12%. Here’s Technorati’s pie graph for June ’06: Dave Sifry notes that there are some significant underreporting issues, especially in Korean and in French. For … Read more
Continuing my series on international Web apps, today I’ll be covering the top products in the United Kingdom market. In case you missed it, over the past week or so I’ve reviewed Germany, Holland, Poland and Korea. This week I’ve got more great non-Silicon Valley startups for you! The information for today’s post about the … Read more
In my search for innovative web and Internet applications, I noted the buzz around new P2P company Skyrider at the end of last week. While it’s hard to say whether Skyrider is truly innovative, seeing as they don’t actually have a product on the market yet (it’s due “in the fall”), they are making interesting … Read more
15 years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee publicly released his WWW project onto the Internet. According to Wikipedia: “On August 6, 1991, he [TBL] posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.” As … Read more
With the launch of Microsoft’s blogging and social networking platform, Windows Live Spaces (formally MSN Spaces), there has been an increase in interest around gadgets – i.e. mini web apps. People can add gadgets into their Spaces site and Microsoft is starting to promote this feature heavily. Jay Fluegel of Microsoft has written a post … Read more
Next in my series on international web apps is Korea. I have Chang W. Kim, who runs a blog called Web 2.0 Asia, to thank for providing me with all the info. Korea is in many ways ahead of the curve in terms of the Internet. It has the highest household penetration of broadband internet … Read more
Mitch Kapor, famous for co-founding Lotus 1-2-3 in the 80’s and more recently the ambitious Personal Info Manager product Chandler (which is taking an awful long time to build – it’s still in alpha after 3-4 years) has a new startup project. That’s Mitch Kapor in the center of the photo btw, next to Bill … Read more
Tom Wolfe could write a novel about this…or at least a short story. Cartoon by Oliver Widder, via Nick Carr’s comments. Jason Calacanis also notes: “I think we have three of the top 20 DIGG users (and two from the top 10!). We also hired from Newsvine, delicious, and Reddit top users.” Finally here’s a … Read more
Widgets (aka gadgets, modules) are mini web apps that you can plug in to a webpage or site such as MySpace, or a personalized start page like Netvibes or live.com. Widgets are becoming more and more important on the Web, so I thought I’d spend a few posts looking more closely at them. Let’s start … Read more
The Diggtrends website has just done some stats relating to the Netscape owner’s offer to buy out digg’s top users. They found that the top 10 users contributed 1792 of the frontpage stories – i.e. 29.8%. The top 100 contributed 3324 stories, i.e. 55.28%. Nearly 30% of frontpage stories contributed by just 10 people is … Read more
This has turned into a very enjoyable series, profiling web products being built all over the world! The latest list is for Poland, courtesy of Sebastian Kwiecien – who runs a blog at web20.pl. Sebastian sent me a very detailed list of Polish web apps, including information about an intriguing social network integrated into Coca-Cola’s … Read more
Nisan Gabbay of Silicon Valley VC firm Sierra Ventures has started up an interesting new blog called Startup Review, which aims to profile Web startups from a business angle. Here’s how he put it in an email to me: “Startup Review will feature weekly, in-depth case studies on successful Internet start-ups. The companies profiled will … Read more
Business 2.0‘s latest print issue has a nice feature on Web 2.0 apps around the world. From Nooked in Ireland to Zoho Writer in India to Gnoos in Australia – it’s an excellent overview of some of the web action happening outside of Silicon Valley. The Business 2.0 article isn’t online yet, but you can … Read more