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
Bit of admin: Stowe Boyd, Umair Haque and I have set up something called Advisory Capital Network. Stowe explained what it is in his intro post: “…a loose federation of strategists to help Web 2.0 start-ups and established players trying to move into the Web 2.0 arena. I’ll provide more details of my advisory roles … Read more
A few weeks ago it was revealed that Microsoft had acquired online gaming advertising platform Massive for “between $200-$400 million”. Now I’ve discovered that a kiwi (from Wellington of course!) was one of the co-founders. According to this NZ Herald story, 31-year-old Wellingtonian Claudia Batten founded Massive Inc four years ago with two expat Australians … Read more
One more quick post for the day, before I go and watch the rugby (go Canes!). Hitwise has done a table showing relative popularity of the Google properties: Compare this to Alexa’s breakdown: – google.com – 75% – mail.google.com – 8% – images.google.com – 8% – groups.google.com – 2% – video.google.com – 2% – news.google.com … Read more
Mark Fletcher in many ways embodies the successful Web startup entreprenuer, having created and sold two multi-million dollar companies – ONEList to Yahoo (via a merger with eGroups) and Bloglines to Ask Jeeves. Niall Kennedy has notes, audio and a transcript of a talk Fletcher recently did. This is pretty much required reading for budding … Read more
Yesterday Yahoo! held their Analyst Day – the 188-page slide presentation is here (12MB). There’s too much in the preso for any one mind to fully comprehend, but here are the things that stood out for me… Yahoo’s Big Bets for the Next 5 Years See slide 16: 1. Next Generation Experience –> a.k.a. a … Read more
Google has just released its Ajax toolkit, called Google Web Toolkit: “Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language.” Also an interesting rumor is swirling around that Google either partnered with, … Read more
Eric Weaver has come up with a very useful list of web/media conferences for this year, something which I was looking for a couple of weeks ago but couldn’t find. I’m travelling to Silicon Valley again in June and will be attending Supernova, Bloggcon and maybe Gnomedex. I’m looking forward to my next trip to … Read more
Feedburner has been running ads in feeds for a little while now. They have a slick self-service system for publishers to select which ads run in their feeds, which personally I’ve been happy with (it allows me to delete any ‘offers’ of ads with a $1 CPM gross – there are surprisingly a lot of … Read more
The world’s most visited webpage, Yahoo.com, has just had a major re-design (available for now at yahoo.com/preview) and Read/WriteWeb has the inside story. As well as the first in-depth look at the new yahoo.com, I have for you an exclusive podcast interview with Yahoo! Chief Product Officer Ash Patel and Vice President of Front Doors … Read more
Tim Bray in a post entitled What Matters: “Every day that goes by I believe more and more that the only important new thing is that the Net is read-write. Everything that matters follows from that.” I came across this the same day that I noticed a newround of ‘defining web 2.0’ posts popping up … Read more
There’s been a lot of talk recently about Josh Kopelman’s post, in which he wrote: “As more and more entrepreneurs start building what Fred Wilson referred to as second derivative companies, I think they run a big risk of designing a product/service that is targeted at too small of an audience. Too many companies are … Read more
I just noticed that MSN has a new project called MSN Originals, in which MSN will partner with content creators to deliver a “new generation of storytelling online”. It’s described as: “MSN Originals will expand the ways that top brands can tell their stories beyond standard media through in-content integration, and even have a seat … Read more
DataMashups.com is the latest Ajax-based web app development service to be released. It’s a hosted service for developers and offers an integrated development environment “to rapidly create mashups and web applications with limited or no need for server side code”. The service is based on the open source AppliBuilder – a AJAX builder tool. The … Read more
Stowe Boyd and Mike Arrington reported today that AOL’s new social networking product AIM Pages is now live. I’m told by my sources that it’s still in the testing phase, nevertheless it *is* live on the Web. There is a lot more functionality to come though. For example PaidContent wrote recently: “Unlike walled-garden Classic AOL, … Read more
Pageflakes, one of the little startups in the ‘personalized start page’ market, has come out with a page publishing feature that nicely connects with my post the other day: Web 2.0 market segment mashups. In that post I noted that we’re seeing a lot of market segment cross-over nowadays, in terms of functionality and feature … Read more