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
In a blog post over the weekend, Facebook announced that it will remove application boxes from its service on August 23. As we explained recently, boxes enable Facebook users to display third party content on their profile pages. Examples include a list of the books you’re reading, the latest movies you’ve watched, tweets you’ve made. … Read more
Xerox PARC famously invented the graphical user interface (GUI) for modern computers, then just as famously failed to capitalize on it. Now called “PARC, a Xerox company,” it continues to innovate to this day in a variety of domains – including web applications. PARC (which stands for Palo Alto Research Center) tackles large computing problems … Read more
Yesterday we gave you 5 reasons why you should read your next book on an eReader device. Needless to say, many paper book fans protested in the comments. And with good reason. Paper books have many things going for them and it’s still early in the evolution of eBooks. This is a technology blog. However, … Read more
Recently I began to buy eBooks for the Kindle application on my iPad. While I still love paper books, the digital wiles of eBooks are looking increasingly attractive to me. Below are five eBook features that may tempt you to buy electronic books too. I should note that I wasn’t a hold-out on eBooks for … Read more
It’s fascinating to track the changing dynamics of how artistic content is delivered and promoted on the Web. Last week we looked at how the band Arcade Fire released its latest album ‘The Suburbs’ via the Web, using social media like Facebook and YouTube. Today we check out how a web site in the backwaters … Read more
A few weeks ago I wrote that we’ve moved to an era of the Web that is beyond social. My contention is that successful services of this era of the Web will be ones that filter, structure and personalize the vast amount of data coming onto the Web. An example of this kind of application … Read more
Earlier this week I complained that Facebook widgets are a mess. Widgets (a.k.a. “boxes”) enable Facebook users to display third party content on their profile pages. Examples include a list of the books you’re reading, the latest movies you’ve watched, tweets you’ve made. Alert readers pointed out that in fact Facebook plans to completely scrap … Read more
Tomorrow the band Arcade Fire releases their new album, The Suburbs. It’s interesting to look at how a popular band of today utilizes the Web to release and promote a new album. Is the band using Facebook more than MySpace now? Do they use Twitter and, if so, how? What music web sites are they … Read more
In the sidebar of your Facebook profile, below information about you and your friends, you can place widgets (a.k.a. “boxes”). These typically pull in information from a third party web service – for example Twitter, a book reviews site, a music application. This is all possible thanks to a development platform which Facebook introduced in … Read more
Content farms have been in the spotlight over the past year. They’re companies that generate hundreds or thousands of new pieces of content on a daily basis. Much of their traffic comes from Google search, so the aim of content farms is to rake in the money with online advertising. Demand Media has been the … Read more
Earlier today we published an analysis of the top traffic drivers in social media, based on data from Web analytics company Woopra. The biggest traffic driver was StumbleUpon (51%), followed by Digg (30%), Hacker News (12%) and Reddit (5%). Surprisingly, tech news community Slashdot was not in the list of top referrers. In fact, according … Read more
2-3 years ago, so-called “startpages” were all the rage – online dashboards where users could store links and quickly scan important news feeds. Startpages were also an evolving platform for “widgets,” mini web apps inside of a web page. The big Internet companies had startpages: iGoogle, My Yahoo!, Microsoft’s Live.com. Among the startups, Netvibes managed … Read more
When you think of social media, two products immediately come to mind: Facebook and Twitter. If you’re in the technical world, you’d probably also mention Digg and Slashdot. A product that is rarely talked about among social media products, but has a surprisingly large footprint on the Web, is StumbleUpon. It now has 10.6 million … Read more
The iPad has taken the tech world by storm this year. In a half-year poll, ReadWriteWeb readers voted it the most important product of 2010 so far. One of the few criticisms of the iPad has been that it’s mostly a media consumption device. It doesn’t have a camera and writing on the iPad is … Read more
The Internet will run out of Internet addresses in about 1 year’s time, we were told today by John Curran, President and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). The same thing was also stated recently by Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist. The main reason for the concern? There’s an explosion of … Read more