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
Time for your weekly dose of Web 2.0. This week: Yahoo yahoo yahoo (is there an echo in here?), Wikipedia, Web 2.0 start-ups, AutoLink (I know, but bear with me…), Ruby on Rails. btw what’s the best time of the week to publish this regular feature of R/WW? OK let’s try Monday afternoon NZ time, … Read more
Update 2: After email discussions with Jon, I’ve discovered my figures were a bit out and so I’ve fixed that up now. In my updated figures, I now see evidence of what Jon pointed out in his post – i.e. a general tapering-off in new public subs added in December and February (albeit not so … Read more
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “Web 2.0 defines a newer incarnation of the World Wide Web typified by the transition from the typical website hosting HTML/XHTML pages, to a platform that provides a point of presence (sometimes known as a Web portal), from which any of the following interactions may occur: 1. Syndication of content … Read more
My 3 month contract with Marqui is up and I’ve decided not to renew. I’ll write a summary post in due course, after things have settled down a bit. Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)
Tomorrow, 2 March 2005, marks the 10-year anniversary of Yahoo. According to a recent AP article: “Yahoo already has amassed an audience of 345 million, including 165 million registered users who rely on the company’s Web sites for e-mail, e-commerce, news, entertainment, driving directions, matchmaking, weather forecasts, job leads and search results. The company believes … Read more
This week: AP’s RSS feeds, Enterprise RSS developments (Newsgator, Nooked), professional bloggers (Kottke, Darren Rowse), Odeo (podcasting), Ajax. p.s. headers in honour of the Oscars. Best Use of RSS Feeds by a News Collective And the winner is: Associated Press! …um, or Reuters. Because they both have RSS feeds. Hmm, seems the Oscars theme for … Read more
Bob Wyman of PubSub has just written a killer post on the future of blogging (or one of them…). An excerpt: “What Kedrosky is speaking of is what we at PubSub have been referring to as “Structured Blogging” and may be what Mark Fletcher of Bloglines/AskJeeves has listed as “Functional Blogging” in presentations he’s recently … Read more
‘Journey to the (Revolutionary, Evil-Hating, Cash-Crazy, and Possibly Self-Destructive) Center of Google’. That must go down as the silliest title for a tech article this year, nevertheless GQ’s profile of Google was an interesting read. After that I happened to browse around the GQ website and saw an interview with Russell Crowe. He was named … Read more
First, some context… Jay Rosen, in the “after matter” of his article on the New York Times purchase of About.com, posts an email response from Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen said: “The real secret of About.com is that they have figured out a way to get 500 domain experts to work for peanuts, in return for the … Read more
One of my readers Taewoo Danny Kim recently compared Web 2.0 to the Semantic Web and I think he hit on an important point. He wrote in an email that Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web are… “…basically moving towards the same thing (web as platform) from two different directions: web 2.0 more from the … Read more
A look back at the week that was in the world of Web 2.0. This week: Google’s AutoLinks feature, IE7, NY Times buys About.com, more Big Media blogging coverage, Bloglines hacks. Sponsored Link: Shout-out to my sponsor, Marqui. Their CMS software now powers Chicago radio station WVON’s website. AutoLinks and Annotation Ever since Google made … Read more
It’s been a while since I’ve published a book review on R/WW, so I’m going to briefly review 5 books that I’ve read during the past few months. Four of them are Web Technology-related and the other was an eBook that I bought. The Nudist on the Late Shift : And Other True Tales of … Read more
Andrew Nachison from The Media Centre raises some interesting issues regarding RSS content aggregation. He boils it down to these 3 questions: 1. Machines vs. humans? [in regards to aggregation] I agree with Andrew’s conclusion: “This isn’t an “either/or” theory but a “both/and” reality.” P.S. also check out The Media Center Matrix. Rich Skrenta from … Read more
Elise Bauer has posted a comprehensive analysis of Weblog Authoring Tools market share. As with RSS Aggregator market share stats, there are a lot of caveats. But much can be gleaned from Elise’s post, which is a continuation of an analysis she did in August 2004. The data is gathered from what Elise calls “Google … Read more
Try saying that three times fast! Jupiter Research analyst Eric Peterson recently had another chat with Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher. The resulting post from Eric pretty much confirms my theory that Bloglines was scared off its contextual advertising strategy by vocal publishers (big and small). Here’s what Eric wrote: “[…] It turns out that Mark … Read more