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
This post doubles as an update of my writing goals and a short review of Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball. First, my goals. Lately on Read/Write Web, I’ve been exploring options for my future. eBooks and Knowledge Management storywriting are a couple of things I’ve been researching. And one thing I passionately wrote about on this … Read more
It’s Friday afternoon where I live, so time for a less serious post. There’s an art to creating good weblog post titles and most of the time I craft my post titles after I’ve written the post. However some post titles are just too good NOT to use, because they’re witty or amusingly cliched or … Read more
Jason Kottke wrote today that the blogging revolution will be commercialized. He said that “out of Technorati’s top 100 most-linked weblogs, only 16 don’t feature advertising or are otherwise noncommercial.” NB: he had some provisos on who in the top 100 really qualifies as a blog. There are a lot of issues to consider in … Read more
As a follow-up to my previous post, I decided to take the plunge and sign up with Feedburner (hat tip to Cristian!). Feedburner is a third-party service that generates an enhanced RSS feed for you. What’s enhanced about it? For starters it enables you to track RSS statistics for all RSS Aggregators (not just Bloglines). … Read more
Remember my post 3 months ago that analysed Bloglines subscriber stats? Well I thought I’d review the numbers. You can blame Seb Paquet for this 😉 Why? Because he’s just posted something on his weblog for the first time in over 3 months, which got me thinking about how his time away from blogging affected … Read more
After my Dave Snowden grokking last week, I’ve been reading up on storytelling in KM. Bill Ives has some fantastic reading on this subject and I intend to read Steve Denning too. I was thinking this morning about how people have different niches and specialist talents. For example, I’m a better writer than I am … Read more
Last night I proclaimed we’re in a Content Renaissance and this morning, what do I stumble across but a bunch of articles saying the very same thing! It’s either a case of ‘great minds think alike’, or there really is a content renaissance happening. 🙂 For example, Robert Scoble wrote a rah-rah article about “the … Read more
Is it just me, or is CONTENT making a comeback on the Web? I’ve been reading a lot of the Web 2.0blogging and I sense, even from across the other side of the world, that the Web is entering another bubble of optimism. Frankly, I wish I was over in America soaking it up. I’ve … Read more
This post could be sub-titled “Grokking Dave Snowden”, because that’s how I felt after reading this PDF file from AOK (Association of Knowledgework). The PDF features extracts from a proposed AOK book entitled Stars Of The New Order: What They’re Telling Business Leaders. The chapter that got my attention was chapter 13: Third Generation Knowledge … Read more
I love this extract from a Web 2.0 workshop about Enterprise social software, as blogged by Denise Howell: Ross Mayfield (SocialText) and Michael Pusateri (Disney) are discussing using SocialText (and blogs and wikis in general) in business. Michael works for the television/ABC arm of Disney, and they’re using SocialText. He has a great point: how … Read more
People have been talking recently about all the different buckets they drop their content into. Especially in this world of decentralized web services we live in today (Internet as Platform and all that…). We have a wide variety of specialist content services to choose from – e.g. Flickr and del.icio.us. It’s all microcontent and so … Read more
I’ve been readingup on Yahoo!’s decision to add RSS feeds to the mix of content they provide on the My Yahoo! portal. The decision for them is all about enhancing their strategy for users to put all their Web content “in one place” – their place. It’s the same old Portal strategy that was so … Read more
Slashdot pointed to a new Tim Berners-Lee interview about the Semantic Web. While on face value it’s YASWI by Sir Tim (Yet Another Semantic Web Interview), there are some great quotes in this one. e.g. When asked if the Semantic Web is just a way to automate things that a human would do, Sir Tim … Read more
Douglas Coupland returns to form big-time with this sensitive and soulful book, Hey Nostradamus!. Before I get to the review, I’ll go over my background as a long-time Coupland fan – because it’s especially relevant to my thoughts on Hey Nostradamus!. I discovered him during the 90’s and he was one of the quintessential writers … Read more
I’ve mentioned that September is Month of Mobility at Read/Write Web, but I haven’t posted about it as much as I wanted to. Why? It’s because the mobile world is mostly new to me, which means I’ve had to batch process a whole bunch of information about it over the past few weeks. Frankly I’ve … Read more