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
Following on from my post at the end of last week listing the top German web apps, R/WW reader Mark Schoondorp sent me a list of Dutch web apps. Mark himself is the designer of Wat vinden wij over (meaning ‘What do we think of” / ‘What is your opinion on’ / ‘what do we … Read more
So I promised to start profiling more innovative, boundary-pushing Web tools on R/WW. The problem with this strategy is that a lot of innovative tools are hard to grok – which means more work for me. What have I gotten myself into? 🙂 Recently Thomas Bate of British data visualisation company Visokio contacted me, to … Read more
RealNetworks had their Q2 2006 Earnings Conference Call on Thursday evening (PST) and the transcript from SeekingAlpha makes for interesting reading. The two main points that came out of it, from a product and market perspective, is that 1) RealNetworks is exhibiting very strong growth in the gaming market; and 2) they see Microsoft’s Zune … Read more
The text of Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie’s speech at Thursday’s Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting 2006, makes compelling reading. To me it sums up why we’ve moved far beyond the Web 2.0 trend and into something much deeper and richer. Web innovation, which is primarily what my blog explores, is no longer just about … Read more
The Museum of Modern Betas is an excellent resource for finding out trends in (beta) web apps. A new list that caught my eye recently was the Beta Quotient for Germany – i.e. a list of 100 web 2.0 apps from Germany (betas and non-betas). Germany has a beta quotient of “more than 50%”, but … Read more
The latest version of Yahoo! Messenger with Voice was officially launched today, a month after the beta was released. This is version 8, which includes plug-ins for the first time. Third-party developers can create plug-ins (aka widgets) for the platform. This has already proven to be very popular – since opening up the plug-in platform … Read more
When I profiled new broadband video portal Gotuit earlier this week, I was surprised by the negative feedback in both my comments section and in the Slashdot story comments. Some of those criticisms were technical – e.g. Mind Booster Noori pointed out that Gotuit requires Flash > 7, which means that Linux users are excluded. … Read more
Community news site Reddit is integrating its software into Slate.com, the venerable Webzine currently owned by Washington Post. The goal is to give Slate readers “a new way to find and discuss its best content.” Slate.reddit recently went live, “as the first step in bringing the reddit format to Slate readers (integration with the Slate … Read more
As Read/WriteWeb continues to evolve and ramp up its traffic, I’ve found that it’s consuming more and more of my time. I love it of course, as this blog is (and always has been) my passion. I’ve recently had a re-design and I’ve been putting a lot of effort into the content – making sure … Read more
The media blitz from News Corp. executives on MySpace is increasing, with two excellent articles on The Hollywood Reporter and Washington Post. In The Hollywood Reporter, Fox Interactive Media president Ross Levinsohn says that social networking is just a platform for “peer recommendation” services: “What’s next for FIM is leveraging MySpace’s online community and communication … Read more
Gotuit Media, an established player in on-demand video, today announced the launch of its new broadband video portal – Gotuit.com. I got a sneak peak of the new portal and spoke with Mark Pascarella (president of Gotuit Media) and David Laubner (Director of Product Marketing) about the launch. Gotuit.com is a free service. It offers … Read more
SiliconBeat has published a list of all “Web 2.0 companies” that received venture backing over 2005 and so far in 2006. The list was created by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. In the comments to SiliconBeat’s post, two prominent 2.0 VCs have dissed the list. Peter Rip thinks it’s “ridiculous”, saying that “Web … Read more
Long-time readers of Read/WriteWeb may recall that I used to do a weekly summary of the top stories of the week, called the Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up. It ran all through 2005 and for a long time was the most popular feature on R/WW. I decided to put it to one side at the start … Read more
Netscape boss Jason Calacanis has offered to essentially buy out the top users on Digg, Delicious, Flickr, MySpace, and Reddit for $1000 per month: “We will pay you $1,000 a month for your “social bookmarking” rights. Put in at least 150 stories a month and we’ll give you $12,000 a year. (note: most of these … Read more
The June 2006 edition of Business 2.0 magazine lists the 100 fastest-growing tech companies of 2006. One trend that has emerged is that online advertising has replaced retailing as the Web sector that is most in demand. While in 2005 eBay was ranked 14 and there were two other retail companies in the top 20, … Read more