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
Summary: For my blog, RSS is a much more important content format than HTML these days. In one of my posts, five and a half times more important! Darren Rowse writes that Page Views per user for blogs is on average relatively low – less than 2 pages per visit. After a bit of research … Read more
A couple of weeks ago Charlie Schick posted about the lack of mobile-focused bloggers in the Web 2.0 Workgroup. Charlie wrote: “…from the list, I, of course, did not see a person focusing on mobility. I’m not surprised. Mobile might not need a special focus, but it sure should be part of the discussion.” I … Read more
Note: The Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-Up is back with a new publishing day (Fri) and a new format, a countdown of the Top Ten Web 2.0 issues or news stories of the past week. Also I’m on the lookout for a new sponsor for the Weekly Wrap-Up. It’s had 3 extremely satisfied sponsors over the … Read more
Great article from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, covering Yahoo’s strategy. Interesting comparisions to Microsoft and Google, plus lots of stats to pore over for the number crunchers amongst us. But what I enjoyed most was how Wharton wrapped up so many of the themes I and others have been blogging about … Read more
From Yahoo’s RSS honcho Scott Gatz: “Tonight we are launching a full post rss reader in the new Yahoo Mail beta. If you are in the beta, you’ll automatically get the new features. RSS in mail makes perfect sense for a few reasons: 1) people already spend a lot of time in their Mail experience, … Read more
Last night Yahoo! announced they are integrating RSS into their web mail and alerts products. As Scott Gatz explained in an interview with PodTech: Yahoo’s plan, which started in January 2004 when they launched RSS in the My Yahoo portal, is to “bring RSS to the masses”. I liked how Ben Barren described this as … Read more
I’ve made some changes to my new design. Less shocking red and also a new logo (see below). A huge thanks to Ariel from mEgo, who made the logo for me and created the new color scheme. Thanks Ariel! Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)
In an article entitled The Return of Monetized Eyeballs, Om Malik values BoingBoing at $34 million – calculated at $38 per unique monthly website visitor (the average purchase price per unique user of acquisitions during the past year). John Battelle, who manages BoingBoing, thinks that figure is off because it’d be hard to make that … Read more
Ted Gilchrist pointed to a new text-to-voice service he’s running called Botcast Network. He’s created a special podcast feed for my blog, so you can regularly listen to my blog posts being spoken in a robot voice. I actually already had a text-to-voice service running on Read/WriteWeb, Talkr, so I thought I’d compare the two … Read more
In my previous two ZDNet posts, I’ve been exploring the Web browser market. Here are brief highlights from those posts: Mobile Web browsers – Microsoft’s downfall?: As we begin to use mobile devices more and more to access the Web, Microsoft’s browser dominance may begin to ebb away. 2008-09 is predicted to be when the … Read more
Thinking Outside the VC Box is a fantastic, almost Philip K. Dick-like, essay by an unnamed SOA Web Services Journal writer. It’s on one of my favourite themes, the virtual office. Among the things discussed is “the momentary enterprise”, defined as a temporary business that leverages “pervasive data”. It seems to support Evan Williams’ recent … Read more
ProgrammableWeb has released a list of ‘popular’ mashups, which John Musser calculated from a mix of click-throughs and user ‘votes’ based on a 1 to 5 scale rating system. Here are the top 10 mashups according to ProgrammableWeb: 1. Virtual Places 2. Weather Bonk 3. Diggdot.us 4. Flash Earth 5. Adactio Elsewhere 6. Where’s Tim … Read more
I’ve upgraded my blog to Movable Type 3.2, in order to defeat some bugs and trackback spam that had infiltrated the previous installation. So apologies if you’d visited my site recently and found it under construction. Note that I resisted the urge to put a blinking and animated ‘Under Construction’ button on my homepage – … Read more
Mike mentioned today that the Web 2.0 Workgroup that Mike, Fred Oliveira and I formed about a month and a half ago has grown to twenty blogs. We’ve also added a Swiki search engine (a group search with tag clouds) and categorized the blogs: Category Sites Analysis & Trends Read/WriteWeb, Dion Hinchcliffe,Susan Mernit’s Blog, Web … Read more
Dan Grossman has a thought-provoking post entitled Silicon Valley’s Hiring War – And The Impact to Startups. He suggests that Start-ups will start looking outside the Valley for talent: “…I think the talent wars will be good for cities outside of the Valley, as companies look elsewhere to find smart people. It’s already possible to … Read more