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
October 15, 2003 I read with interest Matt Haughey’s essay Blogging for Dollars, where he relates his experiences running Google’s Adsense adverts on his TiVo-focused weblog, PVRblog. Matt is making a pretty penny running the Google ads on his TiVo blog and one of the main reasons why is that it is focused on a … Read more
I’ve just finished transferring a bunch of links from Outlook to my linkblog. They are links I’ve been hoarding over the past few months, as ideas for future weblog articles or just for inspiration. I plan to use my linkblog to store all the ideas I harvest from the Web. Beats emailing myself, plus because … Read more
I’ve just returned from 4 days holiday. I was disconnected from the Web for the entire time. This was a good thing, as I spent lots of quality time with my family. Now I’m back sitting in front of my PC at home. I’ve spent the last hour reviewing stuff in my RSS Aggregator. But … Read more
I’ve been playing around with some linkblog solutions. Firstly, on Phil Pearson’s advice I tried del.icio.us. Once I negotiated my way around the minimalist design and even more minimalist documentation, I liked del.icio.us. However the problem is that it’s a 3rd party hosted service and I want to host my linkblog on my own server. … Read more
Too. Much. Information. Data floods my mind and my actions become water-logged. What to do? There’s too much to do. Information washes over me, my head is submerged. Metadata fills my nostrils. I’m drowning, help! I’m being melodramatic 🙂 But actually I do feel this way sometimes. Right now I am struggling to manage my … Read more
I’ve been thinking about starting a linkblog, like Phil Pearson has just done. Two of my favourite daily reads are Anil Dash’s Daily Links and Erik Benson’s Morale-o-Meter. Both those guys post a daily list of external links, with a 1-2 line comment on each link, which pretty much align with my own interests. Personally … Read more
September 30, 2003 2003 has so far been a year of hype for weblogs and k-logs. Blogging is on the cusp of the mainstream. Or is it? A few posts recently have me wondering: why would normal people want to publish to the Web? Mark Pilgrim: “… its possible that an unfiltered… unedited… personal publishing … Read more
September 29, 2003 CSS and XHTML are still dominating my mind’s attention.xml file. As you can see in my menu, they’re numbers 1 and 2 in my Weekly Topic Top 10. btw the Topic Top 10 is going to be a weekly record (pardon the pun) of the most popular topics on my mind. I’ve … Read more
I’ve been totally absorbed in my CSS re-design this past week. I did some final tinkering tonight, trying to find a solution to the “bottom horizontal bar” issue (outlined in my previous post). But CSS positioning is an abstract thing to get ones head around. It’s not like good old fashioned HTML table designs, where … Read more
I’ve been fixing up some teething problems with my new CSS design and I’m quite pleased to report that my homepage is now 100% valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional! I checked this at the W3C Validator. A couple of days ago I had about 360 errors on my test page, but I whittled it down in … Read more
I’ve done a re-design of my Radio weblog, using CSS. Look ma, no tables! Yes, it’s now a tableless design. I’m doing my bit for the web standards cause, although I haven’t yet achieved 100% XHTML validation. For my re-design I used a CSS Zen Garden design by Michael Landis, who kindly gave me permission … Read more
September 21, 2003 Andrew Chen wrote a response to my previous post about Syncato. He thinks I want to create something called a “distributed conversation protocol” and then take over the world. Actually creating a protocol would be the difficult part, given what is happening with Atom 🙂 So no, I’m not advocating a new … Read more
Jon Udell is getting very excited about a new weblog product called Syncato, which is described here: “Syncato is a weblog system designed to extract the maximum potential from the content of your posts. All posts in Syncato are stored as XML within a native XML database and are searchable using XPath queries. This includes … Read more
Forgive me, it’s the end of the day and I don’t want to write my usual lengthy blog post. So I thought I’d do the blogging equivalent of “piano pieces”, which in this case is a collection of various links and quotes that have caught my eye recently: Prelude No. 15 in D flat Op. … Read more
Matt Webb blogged the Hypertext03 conference and the resulting notes are a good scan. Thank goodness for people like Matt who blog conferences, because those of us who live on the other side of the world don’t get to go to these flash harry conferences *sulk*. Matt’s notes on Ted Nelson’s speech were especially interesting. … Read more