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
What’s been happening in the world of “Web two dot oh” (as Jeff Bezos pronounces it) this week? Let’s find out. First allow me to give a shout-out to my sponsor, Marqui. Their CMS software now powers the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission website. Bloglines Sale (my last comment on it, I promise) The Bloglines sale … Read more
Andrew Watson suggests that my post about Bloglines being scared off its advertising strategy would make a great Oliver Stone movie 🙂 Heh, I won’t sell my screenplay to Stone for less than a cool million! 😉 Seriously though, it’s possible my post did sound like a Conspiracy Theory, but I suspect what I wrote … Read more
Provocative post by Jason Calacanis on the Bloglines sale. He says it’s “a horrible business and it will never make money.” The reason? He reckons “95-99% of the RSS reader market” will belong to the Big 3 of Yahoo, Microsoft and Google within 2 years. That’s the ‘bigco will crush littleco’ theory, which is an … Read more
You may be getting sick of ‘2.0’ being stuck onto the end of everything, but I can’t resist pointing to this excellent post by VC Fred Wilson. He characterises the mid-to-late 90’s era of Web content creation companies like About.com (ex-The Mining Company), Geocities and Tripod as “blogging 1.0”. The likes of Denton’s Gawker, Calacanis’ … Read more
Here’s my summary of what went on in the Web 2.0 world this past week. Headlines inspired by tabloid newspapers. Bloglines Shocker! Butler Buys Master of the Blog Universe! The big news of the week was Mary Hodder’s scoop that Bloglines has (probably) been bought by Ask Jeeves, the genial but non-trendy search engine company. … Read more
Last week I wrote about topic/tag/remix feeds. I think these may in future become more popular than people feeds. So to follow that up, here are some practical tips on how to get started with topic and tag feeds (I’ll address remix feeds in a separate post). The first thing I need to point out … Read more
Rafat Ali over at PaidContent.org goes on a bit of a rant against Reuters and their form of branding. But first, allow me to give a shout-out to Marqui, a CMS (Communication Management Software as a Service) vendor. They are my sponsors and I have to link to them once a week. Anyway, Rafat says: … Read more
Mary Hodder has the scoop, which if true is huge news in the Web 2.0 world. Also quite eerie given what I wrote yesterday! Here’s what Mary blogged: “Ask Jeeves Buys Bloglines (Updated 12:30pm. This was apparently going to be announced Tuesday, not Monday.) That’s the scoop. Ask Jeeves is integrating Bloglines into their search … Read more
Richard Koman over at SiliconValleyWatcher gets the scoop from Flickr CEO Stewart Butterfield, on whether Google will replicate Flickr’s photo-sharing service (as suggested by Om Malik). Stewart is quoted as saying: “Given our growth, the technologies cooking in the lab, and that we’re still completing the feature set and infrastructure build out for version 1.0, … Read more
Anybody with an interest in the publishing industry will be familiar with the dream of Print On Demand, whereby you order a book from a kiosk or similar service and a paper book is custom printed before your eyes. Former publishing honcho Jason Epstein is the person most commonly associated with this vision – he … Read more
Alf Eaton has come up with a neat little de.icio.us hack. It lists out the “speediest gatherers” for your del.icio.us page (last 100 items), based on the posting date of items. I think this means it lists out the people who linked to the same thing as you, but got there before you did. So … Read more
I’m trying to figure out what ‘Web 2.0’ means to people. These are the reasons why I’m trying to figure this out: * I want to define it so that my tagline makes sense to people 🙂 * Web 2.0 is my niche topic. It’s my little piece of The Long Tail and I want … Read more
In lieu of a weekly Web 2.0 wrap-up (because nothing much happened this week), I did a cut-up of a recent blog post by ex-Microsoft employee and now Google employee Mark Jen. This is the guy who recently started a job at Google and is blogging about his experiences there. He pulled his blog off-air … Read more
Nearly 2 months into my 3-month Marqui sponsorship, so I thought I’d write down some of my thoughts at this point. There’s been a fair amount of controversy about it, notably from two people who run publishing businesses using weblogs: Jason Calacanis and Stowe Boyd. Jason went so far as to unleash a flock of … Read more
Jay Fienberg wrote a very interesting post regarding the future of RSS aggregators and blogs: “Now (today), it’s so easy to publish blogs that there are tons of them, and the effort to aggregate them is beginning to again attract editor-like and writer-like functions, i.e., merely mechanical aggregation of sites is seeming too read-only-passive, and … Read more