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
A new blog called Web Service Finder has done a Map of the Web 2.0 World and opened it up for editing on a Wiki. This is by the same blog that did a directory of APIs and Web Services – currently featuring 105 APIs and 27 examples. Chris Law, who helped found the social … Read more
Populicio.us was a service that used data from social bookmarking site del.icio.us, to create a site with enhanced statistics and a better variety of ‘popular’ links. However the Populicio.us service has just been taken off air, because its developer can no longer get the required information from del.icio.us. The developer of Populicio.us wrote: “Del.icio.us doesn’t … Read more
Over on my ZDNet blog I’ve written a couple of posts that extend my analysis of The RSS Space. In the first post I explained the RSS Space categorization some more. I then noted that 4 of the 5 categories are at the mercy of The Big 3 of the Internet industry – Google, Microsoft … Read more
Why? Because they’ve only indexed my blog up till 26 May 2005! What’s up with that?! SearchEngineWatch has a good summary of opinions in the blogosphere. Put me down as ‘Underwhelmed’ please Danny (sub-category ‘Peeved’). UPDATE: I’ve discovered the issue is that Google Blog Search indexes the RSS domain name, not the blog one. Because … Read more
sponsored by: This week: Microsoft’s Web 2.0 platform, Rich Clients, Acquisitions, Web 2.0 in The Real World, Techie Post of the week – Web Development Trends for 2006. Microsoft’s Web 2.0 platform News this week that Microsoft is releasing a set of developer APIs for four MSN properties: MSN Virtual Earth, MSN Messenger, Start.com and … Read more
I’ve been one of the beta testers of a brilliant new blog news service over the past 2-3 months – and today it’s gone live. tech.memeorandum is the brainchild of Gabe Rivera. It basically aggregates all the latest news from blogs on one page – but it’s more than that. It’s an automated, constantly-updated, finger … Read more
James MacAonghus from Aqute is writing a series of posts analysing BBC Online, which I highly recommend you check out. In Part 1 James wrote that BBC’s online reach has been steadily growing. In Part 2 he drills down into the details. Although BBC has more than one online strategy, “a pattern is emerging” according … Read more
That’s the title of my latest post on ZDNet. I’m pointing to it here because Bloglines is for some reason not fetching the Web 2.0 Explorer feed, so the 56 people who’ve subscribed already in Bloglines (in just a couple of days – wow!) have not yet been notified of the new post. In it … Read more
Deja vu, is there a glitch in the Web 2.0 Matrix? Phil Pearson has noticed it: “OK guys, this is going too far. Not ALL of the following are required for a web 2.0-style application/site: – Name that consists of a number and a word. (37signals did it for their company, and 43places did it … Read more
A couple of weeks ago I began my new life as a full-time freelance Web Analyst and Writer. One of the things I’ll be doing is co-writing a book for O’Reilly Media on the topic of Web 2.0. I started writing it this week. I’ve also just started a ZDNet blog, called Web 2.0 Explorer. … Read more
John Musser has started a promising new Web 2.0 resources website, focused on technical Web platform development. It features a list of Web 2.0 APIs, 54 of them already! The point of the site, John explains in the ProgrammableWeb blog, is to “create a home page for Web 2.0 developers.” That’s a very worthy aim … Read more
I recently finished a report on ‘The RSS Space’ for a client. In it I mapped out the current RSS vendor landscape, building on a blog post that Brad Feld wrote well over a year ago. I’ve decided to publish the vendor map onto a JotSpot Wiki as a kind of ‘Open Source’ gesture. Currently … Read more
sponsored by: This week: Social tools in disasters, VC trends, Custom Web 2.0 Business Plans, Web-based Office, Techie post of the week – APIs and control. Social tools help in Katrina Hurricane First things first. We’ve all been shocked by the Hurricane Katrina devastation. Dina Mehta has a couple of great posts that show the … Read more
Barb Dybwad posed an interesting question this week: “how many of you read some or all of your RSS feeds on your cellphone? If you do – which application or service do you find the best/easiest to use/most comprehensive and why?” Personally I don’t read feeds in my mobile phone, although I would like to. … Read more
This week I’ve been noticing a lot of Web 2.0-style Office apps coming out. Here’s a selection of some of them: AjaxOffice – “A complete office suite usable via your browser. Your documents are safely stored on a server…” Writely – “The Web Word Processor” (unfortunately the beta is full already). TechCrunch reviewed it and … Read more