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
It’s Day 8 and my word count is 14,778. Here’s the latest. I took yesterday off. Have got a bit of flu, but the show must go on. I’m trying not to take my novel too seriously, having a bit of fun with it. Today I came up with the concept of “space blogs”. Heh. … Read more
12,288 words. Here it is. btw I accidentally discovered an error in the very first sentence today. How embarrassing. So I fixed it up…I thought about leaving it in there, as proof that I haven’t done any revisions yet. But then there are probably plenty of other bits of evidence of that! I may take … Read more
I’ve decided to go the whole hog and post my novel online. There are a variety of reasons for this. One is that posting excerpts would mean it would be read out of context. If I’m prepared to post excerpts, I may as well just tell the whole story. Oh and another reason is that … Read more
8,120 words. I’m wondering whether to post excerpts online. Hmmm. Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)
4,062 words, so I’m keeping pace with the 2000 words per day goal I’ve set myself. I notice I’m currently first amongst the 15 or so Wellington writers 🙂 Enough writing for today. I’m off to watch the All Blacks hammer Wales in the rugby World Cup. Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)
It’s just after 7pm on Saturday 1 November and I’ve finished my first day’s writing in the NaNoWriMo challenge. I managed 2,108 words today, which I’m really pleased with. It took me about 3 hours, a little over 1 hour in the morning straight writing (about 1,000 words) and in the evening I spent 1-2 … Read more
I’ve now officially entered NaNoWriMo, which is an annual challenge to write a 50,000 word novel over 30 days. It kicks off on 1 November, which is one day away for me. I checked into the official NaNoWriMo website tonight and I was surprised to see that 14 other people from Wellington in New Zealand … Read more
I’m one of those people that regularly says: “One day, I’m going to write a novel.” Well now may be my chance. NaNoWriMo is a an annual challenge to write a novel in 30 days, over the month of November. The novel must be at least 50,000 words, which is about 175 pages. I discovered … Read more
I posted this on my linkblog, but I feel like publishing it here too. I heard some of Rautavaara’s Symphony Number 7 (Angel of Light) a few weeks ago, for the first time, and I was quite taken by the music. It reminded me of The Matrix. So anyway tonight I googled Rautavaara and discovered … Read more
I judge the quality of a weblog by its IDEAS, but it seems some people equate quality with popularity. Is the ‘culture of celebrity’ that afflicts Western movies, television and radio creeping in to weblogs as well? These thoughts were prompted by the recent weblog discussion on power laws and how they relate to weblogs. … Read more
The Two-Way Web is a very simple concept. It’s all about normal everyday people having a publishing platform on the Web. Sounds reasonable to me, but a thread on Many-to-Many this week has complicated the issue. Here’s my summary, based on how I first discovered and then tracked the thread (the process somehow seems important … Read more
David Weinberger recently wrote a weblog post entitled When blogs get really popular. In it he states that the line between blogging and email will become blurred. He says: “The word “blog” will expand to cover any linkable posting (a place) where a person gets to speak her mind more than once. If it’s more … Read more
Thanks to Peter Lindberg, for pointing me and others to a couple of Marshall McLuhan articles. But before I talk about those, here’s an overview of Marshall McLuhan from the Wikipedia: “Famous for coining the phrases “The medium is the message” and “the global village,” McLuhan was one of the early purveyors of the sound … Read more
I’ve been threatening to write an article about XHTML for a while now and so here goes. I’ll also talk about CSS and table-less web designs, because in the Web world right now XHTML and CSS are as hot a couple as Ashton and Demi (who may’ve broken up now, but I couldn’t think of … Read more