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
Interesting article from PingMag, detailing the most popular web apps and services in Japan. The highlights… – SNS: “In Japan, social networking is represented mainly by Mixi, with GREE following a distant second.” – Video: “To my knowledge there is no direct competitor to YouTube in Japan but there is an interesting little mashup* from … Read more
My third trip to the US is almost over, as I’m flying back to good old NZ tomorrow. I thought I’d write a quick post about my experiences from this trip. In particular about the 3 conferences I went to: Supernova, BloggerCon and Gnomedex. In reverse chronological order… Gnomedex The most enjoyable conference for me … Read more
I’ve been tracking the release of the new Digg-style community news site Netscape.com, because there is a lot of backlash within the Netscape community about it. A story called Netscape’s Blunder!!! was number 1 on Netscape.com for a while and the latest post on the homepage is entitled A Request by the Netscape Community to … Read more
The new digg-like Netscape has gone out of beta and is now on the main netscape.com domain. I’m currently seeing some great comments coming through on my initial post about the new Netscape. Seems like the existing Netscape user base is not overly impressed – and remember there were some 811 million page views per … Read more
The trouble with business trips is they play havoc with my blogging rhythms, so I’ve not been able to post much ‘professional’ content while I’ve been in the valley. But if you’ll bear with me, I’ve got some great stuff coming up. Including a re-design of Read/WriteWeb which I hope to go-live with soon. In … Read more
The latest comScore stats for May 2006 show how fast social networking sites are growing, but YouTube in particular is displaying spectacular growth. As comScore noted in its monthly report: “There seems to be no end in sight when it comes to the popularity of social networking sites. Myspace.com surpassed the 50 million unique visitor-mark … Read more
At the Supernova conference last week I had the pleasure of interviewing two of Yahoo’s rising stars, VP of Product Strategy Bradley Horowitz and leader of the Technology Development Group Caterina Fake (one of the co-founders of Flickr). They are both part of what is loosely termed an R&D team, which other Yahoo business units … Read more
This is a personal/work post, to explain one of my current projects Micro Media Corporation. It’s a corporate blogging and podcasting program that aims to give business people insights into the Web20 and new media worlds. We’re currently looking for more contributers for the blogging and podcasting, so if you’re interested – please read on. … Read more
Earlier this week I noted that widget services are really ramping up now. Indeed over the past couple of days I’ve noticed lots of action in the burgeoning widgets industry, plus some excellent commentary. At the Connected Innovators program at Supernova last night PostApp revealed the high level of WidgetBox, its “web widget marketplace”. It’s … Read more
This post was written by Ryan Stewart, a Read/WriteWeb guest blogger. Note that Adobe’s use of the terms ‘Read/Write Web’ and ‘kiwi’ is not associated with this blog. There is an interesting project going on over at Adobe that aims to combine the power of Flex 2 with the potential of the Read/Write Web. The … Read more
This Monday Digg will release the next version of the enormously popular community news site digg.com. Mike Arrington and I did a TalkCrunch podcast with Digg’s co-founder and Chief Architect Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson, in which we discussed Digg’s evolution and what the new product (which they refer to as “Version 3”) offers. … Read more
Panelists: Craig Newmark (Craigslist), Saul Klein (Skype), Tina Sharkey (AOL), Mena Trott (Six Apart), Gil Penchina (Wikia) Pic: Dan Farber; from left-to-right: Tina, Mena, Saul (doing a very good Robert Di Niro impression), Gil, Craig Panel Blurb: “Users are becoming active co-creators of their media, commerce, entertainment, and communications experiences. Just how significant, though, is … Read more
This workshop, moderated by Tara Hunt, split into 4 different groups for discussions. This format worked well and the group I joined, about little companies competing against big companies (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc) was an interesting one. The premise: you’re a startup launching a product, but just as this happens you find out a Google … Read more
I missed the ‘Decentralizing Data’ session at Supernova unfortunately (still on NZ time and so slept through my alarm this morn!), but Dan Farber has the story about Yahoo Local‘s new support for microformats. I spoke briefly to Andy Baio afterwards, so I plan to write a more in-depth post later on this news. Here’s … Read more
Paul Kedrosky points to a new service called PostApp, which is a new widgets syndication service currently in private beta. While the sign-up page doesn’t go into detail about what PostApp does, Fergus Burns from Nooked has an interesting post on this subject: “A new space is beginning to develop – widget marketing. Led initially … Read more