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
Congratulations to The Robot Co-op for releasing their new goal-setting social software app, 43 Things, in time for New Year resolutions. I’ve only added a few things to my account so far. I’m still working out the balance between private and public goals, but once I sort that out I’ll add more things. Another observation … Read more
Time for my weekly plug for my sponsors Marqui. I’ve been following what the other paid bloggers are doing and a lot of them are writing up the stories that are being “fed” to us. That’s a sensible tactic, so I feel a bit guilty for not going with the flow and doing the same. … Read more
In 2005 I’ll be sharpening my blog’s focus some more, onto the topic of Web 2.0. I’ll explore what Web 2.0 means in detail in later posts, but for now a quick definition of Web 2.0 is: using the Web as a platform. A good way for me to launch into the new year is … Read more
Technical note: I’ve upgraded to Movable Type 3.14, at the request of my web host. They won’t host old MT blogs anymore, because it “requires too much server (CPU) resources”. The upgrade went smoothly (thanks to my hosts) and the only issue was that MT-Blacklist v1.6x isn’t compatible with MT 3.14, so I had to … Read more
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year everyone! Also my weekly thanks to Marqui for sponsoring my weblog – I’m much appreciative of their support. I’ll be kicking up my heels for the next two weeks, ruminating over my goals for 2005 and re-charging my batteries. I’ll also be preparing my new business venture’s weblog … Read more
Still on the topic of business models for RSS Aggregators, Charles Coxhead asked a very interesting question in the comments to my post entitled Contextual Adverts in Bloglines in 2005. Charles asked: “Do you think there will be any issues for Bloglines in using others content for the purposes of building context for advertising, ie. … Read more
Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines, wrote up a detailed response to my two recent posts: RSS Reader Market Share and Contextual Adverts in Bloglines in 2005. In his post, Mark analyses Boing Boing‘s web stats and draws some interesting comparisons between Google and Bloglines in regards to Boing Boing’s traffic: “Nutshell: Bloglines is the 3rd … Read more
Fascinating post by Jupiter Research analyst Eric Peterson, which outlines the Bloglines business model for 2005 – courtesy of a chat Eric had with Bloglines Chief Mark Fletcher. Eric wrote: “The essence of his answer is “AdWords on Steroids” (my translation, appropriate given their proximity to the BALCO scandal in Northern California). The idea that … Read more
There’s always a lot of talk about market share for web browsers, which is picking up again now that Firefox is starting to eat into Internet Explorer’s huge lead. But there’s been little talk of who is winning the battle for the eyeballs of RSS consumers. Mainly that’s because reading RSS feeds is still a … Read more
It’s probably pushing it to equate Bob Dylan’s career as an incredibly successful musician, with my nascent career as a Blogger. But there were a couple of extracts in the first volume of Bob Dylan’s autobiography that I, as a Blogger, identify strongly with. The first quote comes from page 18, where Bob was outlining … Read more
DISCLOSURE: This post is part of my sponsorship arrangement with Marqui. Curious to see what effect the ‘paid for blogging’ program is having on Marqui’s search positioning, I googled the word “marqui” and discovered that my blog is ranked number 4 in the results (as of this writing)… ahead of the official marqui.com website at … Read more
Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg has some predictions for 2005. The first 4 are of great interest to me, so I thought I’d list them here along with some brief comments from moi. Plus at the end of this post, a hint of what I’ll be up to in 2005. 1. Longhorn is no longer … Read more
Thanks to a link from Robert Scoble (who is always looking out for his readers, bless him), my issue with Technorati not indexing my blog came to the notice of Technorati Chief Dave Sifry. To his credit, Dave immediately jumped onto the case and Kevin Marks solved it today. I noticed others have been having … Read more
What, my links not good enough for you Technorati? 😉 I say that with a wink, but to be honest I’m pissed off with Technorati. My main weblog, Read/Write Web, is not being indexed there and so none of my outbound links show up in Technorati. Therefore nobody would know I’m linking to them, if … Read more
Russell Beattie’s just released a service called Mobdex, which serves up eBooks onto mobile phones. I had the pleasure of getting a sneak preview of Mobdex near the end of September, after Russ spotted a post about the Mobile Web on my blog and emailed me. So I’ve been waiting for him to release it … Read more