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
One good thing about audio on the Web is that I can listen to things while I’m working. Which is precisely what I did this morning with Tim O’Reilly’s keynote speech at the Open Source Convention currently being held in the US. The audio was done by IT Conversations, rapidly becoming one of my favourite … Read more
As I was browsing the Web, looking for inspiration, I discovered a work by John Baldessari – a conceptual artist from America. He transformed the library space at UCSD (University of California, San Diego) into a beautiful work of art… the photos online are enough to make me want to go to UCSD and soak … Read more
Yesterday I did my first audio blogging post. I think audio has the potential to be a key part of the so-called Social Web, or Social Media as it’s being called now. And I like the term ‘Social Media’, over the more tradional term ‘Social Software’. It emphasizes that the current revolution of the Two-Way … Read more
Tonight I recorded my first audio blog post, a reading of my January 2004 article The Fractal Blogosphere. Quite topical, given my recent posts on subscriber statistics and weblog popularity. The audio file is .wav format, which you can play in Real Player and probably other audio players as well. I tried to convert it … Read more
I’ve just hit a century, 100 Bloglines subscribers. I was on 79 only 4 days ago, when I posted my article about Bloglines subscriber stats. Mind you it helps when the creator of Bloglines links to you 🙂 To put this into perspective, I also noticed today that Boing Boing has 8,025 Bloglines subscribers! Wow! … Read more
In yesterday’s post I mentioned The 3 C’s: Create, Communicate and Collaborate. The 2nd one could just as easily be ‘Converse’, as in conversations. All of these C’s are things I strive to achieve in my weblog. In an effort to strengthen the ‘Communicate/Converse’ prong, I’ve finally gotten around to converting my Comments system (hey, … Read more
I love Bloglines. It’s a browser-based RSS feeds aggregator that almost singlehandedly proves the case that web applications can be better than desktop-based ones. I say this in the context of Joel Spolsky’s already classic essay on why web browser apps are winning the war against so-called rich or smart clients. “The new API is … Read more
This is a Short Story by Richard MacManus. It takes a speculative look at what the blogosphere might be like in 20-30 years time. I My name is sylvian and this is my story of The System. Twenty years ago it was called the Web. Back then people were making it up as they went … Read more
There’s an interesting meme doing the rounds: what webloggers are reading this summer. This, of course, is right up my street. So here’s what I’m reading currently… although it’s actually the middle of winter here in New Zealand. I’m an eclectic reader, so I usually have a number of different books on the go at … Read more
That’s what I’m doing currently. Gestating ideas, for an innovative new business and also for my writing (and as an extension to both – my weblog). So apologies for the lack of blogging, but I expect to deliver a nourishing meal-sized Read/Write Web entry by end of next week. Feel free to snack on my … Read more
I promised not to focus on web design, as it’s not my niche. But I remain a keen amateur designer, as all Web junkies are, so I want to jot down some notes on Jason Kottke’s re-design. I haven’t read through the 995 comments that people have left on his site, nor have I seen … Read more
I’ve always wanted to namecheck that great Velvet Underground song. I wore my teeth in my hands…So I could mess the hair of the night. Anyway, Sébastien Paquet has posted a suggestion to improve the Topic Exchange – which reminded me of my own efforts to ignite the topics community over a month ago. Here’s … Read more
In my travels today I came across some articles about how Generation Y (people born in 1980’s or 1990’s) use Information Technology. I’m a Generation X’er myself, so Generation Y has always been something of a curiosity to me – as other generations always are, no matter which part of the timeline you come from. … Read more
It’s fun to be a Generalist, you get to explore a variety of different topics and it often makes for good blogging. People don’t really know what to expect when they see a new Read/Write Web item in their RSS Aggregator (although given my current experiment to try and blog a “short and pithy” post … Read more
For what it’s worth, I’ve re-validated my homepage to conform to XHTML Transitional. Thanks to the people who left comments and emailed me about issues relating to validation. The two main culprits in validation always seem to be the ‘&’ character and non-closed <br> tags. Joe Lindsay also pointed out an undefined html entity in … Read more