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
John Battelle’s posted details of the second Web 2.0 Conference, to be held in San Francisco on October 5-7. This is something I’d really really love to attend, but it’s looking like the travel costs are going to be prohibitive – for a po’ kiwi looking to become self-employed this year. Sometimes I really really … Read more
This post by Matt Webb is worth pondering for those of us who are far away from all the Web 2.0 action. Matt wrote that “The Web is San Francisco circa 2001, writ large.” He explained: “The Web’s been coasting since 2001. It consists of that which started in SF and happened to adapt to … Read more
sponsored by: This week: 9-to-5 Web 2.0, Google Maps is where it’s at, Caught between two worlds, Web 2.0 spreading its wings, New apps on the block. Web 2.0 in the 9-5 World I found a couple of posts this week about using Web 2.0 technologies in the workplace – a worthy topic. In the … Read more
Bloglines latest press release left me a bit puzzled at first. In the press release Bloglines congratulates itself on having reached half a billion blog and news feed articles in their database, concluding that it makes them “the strongest blog resource on the Internet.” Fair enough, but I wonder why have they are suddenly re-focusing … Read more
Steve Rider is one of the developers of Microsoft’s Start.com and he gives us an insight to the development plans for Microsoft’s nascent Web-based RSS Aggregator / portal homepage. I think it’s fantastic btw that Steve is willing to share his thoughts – and more importantly, that Microsoft lets him. Google could learn a thing … Read more
My posts about RSS Ripoff Merchants stirred up a lot of controversy and, somewhat surprisingly, it seems I’ve come out of it as The Bad Guy. I kind of feel like Lars Ulrich of Metellica in the Napster case – defender of artists rights 🙂 Anyhow, I wanted my posts to specifically address the issue … Read more
sponsored by: This week: RSS Ripoff Merchants summary, Web 2.0 for teachers, Open Source Radio talks about Web 2.0, EPIC II, search engines with RSS output. RSS Ripoff Merchants summary Well my follow-up post about RSS Ripoff Merchants certainly struck a few raw nerves, including for me. It attracted 55 comments, before I was forced … Read more
The latest version of Microsoft’s Web-based RSS Aggregator, Start.com, has just been released. Microsoft first released a prototype in early March 2005 – my coverage here. Start.com is like a mix between MyYahoo and the new Google Personalized Homepage. It enables users to subscribe to RSS feeds and it is closely integrated with search. Here … Read more
To summarise the issue so far…
Always good to read how non techies are using Web 2.0: Teachers need to give Web 2.0 tools “to students and to members of our community, to stop speaking only to other teachers, to stop behaving as an expert class, and to find a way to have a stake in the interests and knowledge of … Read more
Chris Lydon’s new public radio show, Open Source, goes live. First show is on Web 2.0! Chris wrote afterwards: “‘The revenge of the sources’ was a great line from Dave Winera powerful capsule of the driving energy in Web expressionism.” Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)
Mitch Kapor demos Chandler at the D Conference Chandler is an Open Source PIM (Personal Information Mgmt) app. I’ve been following its progress for at least 3 years now. Progress has been slow, but Mitch Kapor showed off calendaring and some Web 2.0 plug-ins (utilising Amazon and Flickr API’s) at D. Originally published on ReadWriteWeb … Read more
Excellent techie tips from O’Reilly Radar: “A longer-term solution is to build your business model into the API. In my mind the most successful APIs for the company providing the APIs are those from Amazon and eBay.” Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)
NB: This is a re-posting, slightly edited. What would you do if someone was ripping your RSS feed off – that is, copying every single post into their website? And what would you think if some software companies actively encouraged this activity? I call these people RSS Ripoff Merchants. (a sidenote: I’m absolutely not talking … Read more
kuro5hin.org: “By acquiring a Print-on-Demand (POD) company and an ebook software company, Amazon.com is retooling itself to offer a complete publishing solution to authors disenchanted with the current state of publishing.” Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)