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
We’ve written a lot about content farms and in particular the largest of them all, Demand Media. Shares of Demand Media rose 35% today on the back of its IPO. Demand Media’s market valuation now matches the scale of its content business, which pumps out more than 7,000 new articles a day. At the current … Read more
At the end of last week, last.fm suffered an outage that lasted up to 24 hours. In her report on the story, ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez noted that she no longer uses online radio services like last.fm and Pandora. Instead, she’s “moved on to bigger and better things” in the form of new subscription-based services like … Read more
Every Monday evening we’ll be looking at the latest in new media trends. The series is named after the title of one of my favorite books, The New New Thing by Michael Lewis. In that book, published in 1999, Lewis chronicled the dot com era startups that were attempting to re-make various industries. A similar … Read more
Every Thursday evening PT we’ll be reviewing Internet of Things developments from the past week. Internet of Things is a term for when everyday objects are connected to the Internet. It’s becoming an increasingly relevant trend for the Web and media, so we want to keep you updated with the latest news. Tune in every … Read more
Seems like every new media iPad app these days wants to be a magazine. TweetMag is a new content aggregator based around Twitter users, lists and hashtags. It focuses on one of Flipboard‘s features (tweets as content) and expands that concept further. What TweetMag does is look for tweets that include links, then displays them … Read more
Yesterday we looked at the latest “social magazine” app to hit the iPad, called NewsMix. It’s very similar to Flipboard, the innovator and leader in this small but rapidly evolving market. Social magazines is a term that Flipboard came up with. It’s come to mean a News Reader type application for the iPad that has … Read more
The latest social magazine iPad app to hit the market is NewsMix, a $2.99 app that does much the same thing as the increasingly popular Flipboard. So how much chance does NewsMix have to usurp Flipboard? It’s the same chance that online RSS Readers had of usurping Bloglines back in 2004-05, when Bloglines was first … Read more
Every year ReadWriteWeb selects the top 10 products or developments across a range of categories. We kick off the 2010 ‘Best Of’ series with our selection of the top 10 Semantic Web products and implementations of the year. This year we’ve chosen 5 products by semantically charged startups and 5 implementations by large organizations. The … Read more
Over December we’ve reviewed the top Web products and developments of 2010. Now it’s time to look ahead to 2011. The ReadWriteWeb team is always thinking about what’s next, so in our final series of 2010 we attempt to predict the big stories of 2011. Predictions are of course a tricky business. The braver the … Read more
Looking back on the year in Web technology, we can see that several product categories have evolved significantly over 2010. We’ve already written about App Stores and eReaders. Another market that progressed in 2010 was Internet TV. Among the developments: Apple announced a major overhaul of Apple TV, Google launched its Android-powered Google TV platform … Read more
The rise of Facebook as a truly mainstream social network was a big story this year. An interesting question is, how much of Facebook’s success was directly related to its loosening of privacy controls at the end of 2009? That move created both a backlash and a huge bump in users as 2010 unfolded. The … Read more
eBook sales almost doubled over 2010 and now make up 9% of total consumer book sales, according to the Association of American Publishers. This growth was fueled by intense competition amongst eReader manufacturers over 2010. Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble Nook and others attempted to undercut each other throughout the year. Further, the … Read more
At the end of every year, ReadWriteWeb reviews the progress (or otherwise) of big Internet organizations and names one of them our ‘Best BigCo.’ We started this tradition in 2004, making this the 7th year. In 2009 it was Google, thanks to Chrome, Android and other advancements. In 2008 we chose Apple, due largely to … Read more
Yesterday we selected our Best LittleCo of 2010, the light blogging service Tumblr. In this post we select a company that we think has the potential to be Best LittleCo of 2011. Next year we’re expecting a lot from data-centric companies and one in particular. This company provides a platform for developers to create location-aware … Read more
In 2010, we’ve seen the rise of so-called “social shopping” services. They rely heavily on technologies such as social networking, crowdsourcing and smart phone scanners. Here we present five of the main social shopping developments of 2010. This kicks off a series of posts that will be published over November and December, looking back on … Read more