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
Markus Frind is one of the more disruptive (and therefore interesting) bloggers to emerge this year. He’s the guy who burst onto the scene with claims that he’s making $10,000 per day off his online dating site PlentyOfFish.com. I actually met Markus in person last month at the Supernova conference and I can confirm he’s … Read more
Digg.com is not only a thriving community and great source for news, it’s also an increasingly influential website for bloggers and website owners. It can be a heavy driver of revenue-generating traffic and can also help make your website viral (= popular). Given its growing importance then, I thought I’d investigate digg’s stats and identify … Read more
The new-look Ajax-powered Yahoo.com homepage goes live in the US on Monday and will roll out to other regions during the rest of July. Read/WriteWeb exclusively profiled the “preview” two months ago and now it is ready to be the default homepage for Yahoo’s 500 million users. The new homepage – which utilizes ‘Web 2.0’ … Read more
Wufoo is a new web app that enables users to create their own web forms. I have to disclaim that Kevin Hale, the guy who re-designed my blog, is one of the people behind Wufoo – so I’m somewhat biased in writing about it. But to balance that, I’ll also mention other companies who have … Read more
If you’ve visited R/WW over the past week you’ll have noticed a new design has been rolled out. The designer was Kevin Hale of Particletree, who did a superb job. I want to thank Kevin very much for his hard work on the design and for the end result, which I’m delighted with! There are … Read more
RealNetworks is announcing today an enhanced set of Rhapsody Web services APIs and RSS feeds, along with a 3-month competition aimed at getting developers to build on their platform. Rhapsody is one of the biggest music subscription services on the Web. It has over 2 million tracks in its library, which users can listen to … Read more
Written by Ken Yarmosh, a Read/WriteWeb Guest Blogger On average, I hear a Match.com commercial on the radio about once a day. In referring to their user base, their catch phrase goes something like, “there are over 15 million reasons to use Match.com.” Well, they may want to re-think this selling point because MySpace has … Read more
Yahoo has issued a rather hoity-toity response to Hitwise’s stats that claimed MySpace is now the number 1 domain on the Web. Sniffs Yahoo in its official statement: “The report that Hitwise released today with the headline “MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites” is misleading. The Yahoo! network is made up of … Read more
Ex-Yahooligan Ravi Dronamraju noted a couple of months ago (I’ve only just seen it) a subtle but important point about Yahoo’s new Ajaxified homepage: “This homepage dropped the concept of website directory completely. I guess the transformation is complete. Yahoo! is now more about showing people in and around yahoo! network and not about showing … Read more
– List of Social Networking Systems (including their target audiences; very useful resource from Sid Yadav) – MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites (according to Hitwise, www.myspace.com has surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet users) – Rise of the Socially-Integrated Media Empire (Robert Young … Read more
Today Microsoft re-announced their on-demand CRM solution, Microsoft Dynamics CRM – including a new software-as-a-service offering called Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live. According to salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, once again Redmond is reacting to the success of service-based companies like salesforce.com and Google. In an internal email, Benioff riffs on the state of the online business … Read more
First the obligatory disclaimer: I work as a part-time freelancer for Broadband Mechanics, the creators of PeopleAggregator. I’ve actually done analysis and writing work on the PeopleAggregator project itself. So bear in mind that I’m heavily biased 🙂 Even so, I think it’s in my Read/WriteWeb remit to take a high-level look at the concept … Read more
The NY Times reports that old media won out over new media when it came to World Cup coverage. The Times notes that television and newspapers benefited from the World Cup, but seems to overlook (or at least downplay) that Internet services did well too. While the Times article stated that live video feeds were … Read more
Over the past couple of days I’ve gotten 170 comments (and still going!) on a post I wrote last week entitled Netscape Community Backlash. I’ve actually gotten more comments than the official Netscape story on this topic. The general gist of the feedback is that existing Netscape users dislike the new digg-like Netscape and want … Read more
The latest issue of Wired magazine has a useful profile of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which Wired has elevated to number 9 in its latest Wired 40 list (it didn’t even make the list last year). The article focuses on News Corp’s $580 million acquisition of MySpace last year, which has not only shown dividends … Read more