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
Today I arrived in San Francisco for two and a bit weeks of conferences and networking. This week I’m attending the Supernova conference, then it’s Dave Winer‘s BloggerCon IV and finally Chris Pirillo‘s Gnomedex. Marc Canter’s company Broadband Mechanics, who I work part-time for, is releasing People Aggregator at Gnomedex. So all the BBM team … Read more
Digg CEO Jay Adelson took time out of his busy schedule to email me some thoughts about Netscape’s new digg-inspired community news site. Jay’s thoughts below, but first some context. I’ve written two posts about the new Netscape site. In the Read/WriteWeb post I had two main points: 1) I think introducing paid editors into … Read more
Techcrunch has the scoop on the new Netscape portal beta, which bears a striking resemblance to Digg. Mike thinks it’s a “digg killer” and in terms of pure numbers it may well be. Netscape gets a surprising 811 million monthly page views, which digg is at around 200 M per month. But despite the Digg-ish … Read more
It’s a shame to hear from Bob Wyman that PubSub is in trouble and in big danger of shutting its doors. Bob says that “internal political issues” are behind PubSub’s demise and implies that this has deflected resources from actually improving the product. It’s not my place to comment on the politics, but I do … Read more
eBay, in collaboration with JotSpot, has just released a new community wiki – making it almost certainly the world’s largest wiki platform for a commercial website (Wikipedia is bigger, but it’s non-commercial). eBay Wiki is described as “a collection of fact-based articles written and maintained by eBay Community members” and is powered by JotSpot’s innovative … Read more
Sampa is an interesting new homepage-builder product that has just gone into beta. Like a lot of the products I’m interested in these days, it’s quite hard to explain what it is! Sampa founder Marcelo Calbucci, an ex-Microsoftie who is still based in Redmond, calls it a “blog on steroids” – in other words, the … Read more
The official FIFA World Cup website is run by and co-branded with Yahoo. A Washington Post story today highlights the interactive and multimedia features of the site – including blogs, chat, and three- to five-minute video highlights for all of the 64 games. Also in lieu of live webcasts (not possible I presume because of … Read more
Open, freedom, dynamic, flexibility. Not words you’d traditionally associate with AOL. But they’re pushing on with their Open AIM platform, announcing more upgrades to it today. The latest updates are: – Support for AIM Bots – Location-based services – PC-to-PC voice calling – Support for developers working on the Mac OS X, Linux, and Pocket … Read more
It’s funny that I posted the PlentyOfFish.com post not long before the Scoble-leaving-Microsoft announcement predictably blanketed Techmeme. Because reading Robert’s latest post about his decision made me think about the fundamental reason why ‘Web 2.0’ is (dare I say it) in bubble phase right now. It’s the exact same reason the Dot Com bubble occured … Read more
I was pleasantly surprised that my post The Future of Personalized Start Pages get Dugg last week. Looking through the comments, most of the Digg readers liked Netvibes or Google’s start page. btw Google is still promoting its start page on the google.com page, which I think is significant (not many other people do though, … Read more
Markus Frind is an interesting character, who has left some provocative comments on Read/WriteWeb before. He claims he’s earning $10,000 per day from Google Adsense from his dating website, plentyoffish.com. These claims have been vigorously challenged by some, but external data sources (e.g. see this comment thread) do seem to back him up. Recently Markus … Read more
Google is for the first time promoting its Personalized Homepageon the google.com homepage, using football World Cup modules/widgets. There is a “New! Add World Cup live scores and schedules to this page” promo link directly under the search query box, which leads to a “Welcome to Your Google homepage. Make it your own” start page. … Read more
This post was largely written by Ryan Stewart, a guest blogger on Read/WriteWeb. I’ve added my own Best of Breed picks for each category. Feed readers can be divided up into two general camps: The web based feed readers – such as NewsAlloy, Rojo, Bloglines and Google Reader – are mostly powered by Ajax and … Read more
Sun Microsystems is a company that doesn’t get anywhere near as much attention in the techmeme world as Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. Which is kind of odd for a company whose motto seems highly relevant to this era of the Web – “The Network Is The Computer”. I was listening to a podcast that Tim … Read more
Mike Arrington’s a bit peeved at Google. His post is a good vent, but to me the key bit was way down in comment number 33: “…my main gripe is that I want to understand what Google’s overall game plan is. I just don’t see it.” Nobody knows what Google’s grand plan is – I … Read more