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
I was going to leave a comment at Lucas Gonze’s weblog, but I may as well use trackback and hope he sees this. Lucas posted a follow-up to his “whine that policing unauthorized music on Webjay is turning into a huge drag”. He is considering a form of community moderation (suggested by Seb Paquet). I … Read more
Good timing Google! Adding search functionality to my site was on my To Do list for this month and Google has just announced a new AdSense for Search feature. It allows website owners to add a search box to their site and potentially earn some pocket money with ads that display with the search results. … Read more
Cool, I’m Feed of the Day at Feedster! btw regular readers may’ve noticed I’m posting more frequently now. Shorter, pithier posts. But I plan to continue the long-form entries too (like last nights). I’ll see how this experiment goes… Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)
Lucas Gonze, creator of WebJay, said today: “Policing unauthorized music on Webjay is turning into a huge drag. The problem is that I have to impose my puritanism on others, which is absurd.” By “puritanism” I presume he means being morally pure and obeying the law of music copyright. Now, I like WebJay and admire … Read more
In answer to all the blogs I’ve read today: 1. No I don’t want a friggin’ Gmail account. 2. I don’t want to read your opinion on Dave Winer closing down 3000 weblogs.com blogs. 3. I don’t even care about Firefox 0.9 being released. Maybe I’m just in a bad mood today. Sigh, I think … Read more
When I was a very young child, perhaps 5 or 6, I wrote a poem that got published in The Timaru Herald newspaper. My first published writing. I think I may’ve dreamed recently that I’d found a copy of it on the Web. I can’t recall (I’m not good at remembering dreams). Or maybe I … Read more
Knowledge Management is a term that many people dislike, myself included. Firstly it’s a misnomer – you can’t “manage”, at an organization or corporate level, something as subjective and contextual as knowledge. It’s even debatable whether you can manage knowledge at a personal level – because we don’t always know what we know. Secondly, the … Read more
In my previous post, Stasis and Synchronicity, I scratched the surface of something that’s been bothering me recently. I’ve been sensing a degree of stasis in the blogging world, not to mention in my own life (and given what I wrote 12 days ago about weblogs being avatars, perhaps the two are intermingled). I finished … Read more
Jeffrey Zeldman wrote today about Glassdog’s transformation from an “experimental narrative powerhouse” to a mere blog. Under the provocative title The saddest music in the world, Zeldman’s piece was a reflection on how The Web has not lived up to its original promise: “Oh, little child. Long ago, before you were born, some of us … Read more
That’s the title of my second NZ Computerworld article, which is in this week’s edition (pg 16). Here’s a PDF copy of it. It’s also available in HTML format on Read/Write Web. Since it is an article that attempts to bring RSS into a mainstream light, some people who arrive here may not know how … Read more
I recently downloaded the mIRC client and have been checking out the Freenode IRC network. The few times I’ve logged in there haven’t been many people about – mainly because I live in New Zealand and so my time zone is out of whack with the northern hemisphere. But tonight (Saturday night my time) I … Read more
This is a boring post about fixing a couple of tedious Internet Explorer CSS bugs. But I want to record it for my own records and for future Google searchers. 1) The IE Italics bug – in the past I used italics whenever I quoted somebody. However on certain CSS designs, italics breaks the width … Read more
I’m in a stage right now where there are lots of details that I’m juggling in my life, both in the real world and my weblog world. My job is busy, with quite a few relatively exciting projects on the go at the same time. My home life is busy, looking after a highly energetic … Read more
Now you tell me! There is in fact a way to automatically ping Topic Exchange from within Movable Type. Thanks to an old Ben Hammersley post, I found out that the category attributes page has a box to enter TrackBack URIs to automatically ping. So after all my work over the last week, I’ve managed … Read more