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
As TechCrunch reported, two more resources have been added to our nascent Web 2.0 Workgroup. Mike wrote:“Podtech.net is a very popular podcast site hosted by John Furrier that is redefining corporate press practices. Recently, for instance, Yahoo gave Podtech an exclusive pre-announcement right to discuss their podcasting service last weekend. SolutionWatch, written by Brian Benzinger, … Read more
Uber classifieds site craiglisthas requested that Oodle, a classifieds ‘meta’ search engine, refrain from scraping its content. This has the potential to be the first high-profile case of a mash-up site being slapped for taking another site’s content. In a recent ZDNet post, I wrote that the business models for Web 2.0 mash-ups are beginning … Read more
This is the best thing I’ve written in ages… thanks to Saurier Duval for doing a mash-up of my blog. Some choice extracts: “The stats they released today indicate theyre well on their way to explain them in the Web as a service concept (which is by no means a new regular feature of Web … Read more
Mike Arrington has another Ode to Memeorandum on Techcrunch. I’m a big fan of tech.memeorandum too and it’s changing the way I read blogs and catch up with the latest tech news. My first rave review of memeorandum was a month ago when it went live and since then I’ve met Gabe in person – … Read more
For the record, I have actually read Microserfs, by Douglas Coupland. Indeed just over a year ago I wrote on my blog that Microserfs is my favourite Douglas Coupland book. I wasn’t in the room when Dave Winer talked to the others about it, leading him to write this:“I’m over at the Web 2.0 Workgroup … Read more
I’m sensing a backlash about the rising VC interest in Web 2.0. Mike Rundle takes aim at Flock in his post subtitled “The Leaning Tower of Buzz”. He thinks Flock is only useful to the blog crowd and doesn’t have a viable business model. Bart from Flock disagrees, saying in the comments that they do … Read more
The Web 2.0 Workgroup has expanded to 4 blogs (and more to come!), with the addition of Dave Winer’s Two-Way Web blog. This is awesome news, because the Two-Way Web site was a defining influence on me when I first started blogging. Dave was around at the TechCrunch house later in the day and then … Read more
To all those Web 2.0 companies looking to get acquired by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! or eBay, Don Dodge has handily compiled a list of tips. Don works on the Microsoft Emerging Business Team. In his latest post he starts by noting Microsoft’s “rich tradition of acquisitions”. He points to a list of Microsoft investments and … Read more
Yahoo! announced two major products this week: a podcasting service and then blog search integrated with Yahoo! News Search. Both of these products are outputs of Yahoo!’s strategy to introduce more user-generated content to their media offerings, as outlined by their CEO Terry Semel at the Web 2.0 Conference. Some people have criticised the design … Read more
The necessary components of a mash-up according to the panelists are AJAX or a similar client-side technology, APIs in the backend (or RSS and/or scraping if need be – although some people argue scraping isn’t truly Web 2.0), and a lot of work on the UI and data sets by the developer(s). Paul Rademacher mentioned … Read more
During my time in Silicon Valley I’ve been staying in the TechCrunch house with Michael Arrington and Frederico Oliveira (Gabe Rivera of memeorandum fame is also here currently). Mike, Fred and I all blog on the topic of Web 2.0 – so we thought why not create a Web 2.0 network. As you do. It’s … Read more
Marc Andreessen popped into Alex Barnett’s comments to confirm the business goals of Ning. In response to Alex’s well-written analysis of what Ning is trying to accomplish, Marc commented: “Alex — your description of what we are trying to do is very well said. It’s an experiment, but those are the goals. We are going … Read more
Tristan Louis did the numbers on the AOL-WeblogsInc deal. My blog Read/WriteWeb has 1,938 inbound links on Technorati as of today, so according to Tristan’s calculations Read/WriteWeb is worth over $1 million. OK, so there were other factors that contributed to the weblogsinc deal – the value of network effects etc. But I certainly believe … Read more
This week: Web 2.0 Conference Special sponsored by: The past week has been an amazing one for me. My first trip to America and I’ve met so many people that I’d previously only known via the Web (blogs, email, etc). The Web 2.0 Conference was held in San Francisco from Wednesday 5th to Friday 7th … Read more
The conference is over now and so here’s a summary of my blog output from it. I was pumping out the real-time notes over the last 3 days! I didn’t have much time for analysis – my brain was full to the brim just absorbing everything. I intend to dive into the details over the … Read more