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
Two months ago, Yahoo! acquired Associated Content for an estimated $90-100M. Over the past few years, Associated Content has become one of the most prolific content farms (companies that churn out hundreds or thousands of new pieces of content every day). It produces 10,000 new pieces of content per week, which averages out to about … Read more
When it comes to content farms, companies that churn out hundreds or thousands of new pieces of content every day, Demand Media has harvested most of the headlines over the past year. But it’s not the only company out there betting on quantity of content – others include Associated Content (acquired by Yahoo! in May), … Read more
This blog was founded in 2003 on the philosophy of a read/write Web – a Web in which people can create content as easily as they consume it. This trend eventually came to be known as Web 2.0 – although others preferred Social Web – and was popularized by activities like blogging and social networking. … Read more
The new version of Digg has changed the playing field for two of its biggest constituents: power users and publishers. We discuss this with a long-time Digg power user. The latest version of social news site Digg is currently in restricted beta, with an additional 20,000 users added at the beginning of July. The new … Read more
The soccer World Cup has now ended, with Spain the victor. England was unceremoniously dumped out before the quarter finals – but if there was a World Cup for the Semantic Web, then the BBC may have lifted the trophy for its country. A post on the BBC Internet site explains how the BBC World … Read more
Extractiv has quietly launched a service that crawls the Web for text on a specific topic, then transforms it into “structured semantic data.” It’s a direct competitor to Thomson Reuters’ Calais product, which has been doing this for a couple of years now. This type of service is potentially valuable to media companies, search services … Read more
This week we ran a poll asking you to vote for the Web product or platform that has most impressed you in 2010. The overwhelming winner was the Apple iPad, launched in January. This isn’t a surprise, but the fact that the iPad garnered over twice as many votes as the second-place getter shows just … Read more
ReadWriteWeb is looking for a new Community Manager. This is a full-time role and location is flexible, as we are a virtual team. However, we do need someone in the United States for this particular role. ReadWriteWeb is privileged to have an engaged community of decision makers and thought-leaders. The community manager’s job is to … Read more
Yesterday we delivered our half-year report for the Web. In that post we summarized some of the highlights of the first half of this year: the launch of the iPad in January, Google Buzz arriving in February, Facebook’s Open Graph platform announcement in April, the release of iPhone 4 in June, Twitter’s World Cup features … Read more
It’s now a little over 6 months into 2010, so a good time to reflect on the highlights of the year so far. At the beginning of the year, we identified some key trends to track: (in alphabetical order) Augmented Reality, Internet of Things, Mobile, Real-Time Web, Structured Data. Mobile and Real-Time Web have been … Read more
When semantic recommendations service Evrilaunched two years ago, the product (backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen) was seen by many as a type of search engine. Nowadays, Evri models itself as a topic-based news service; in particular, tapping into the real-time streams of mixed media coming from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other sources. At the … Read more
This week we’ve been exploring the emergence of the Semantic Web among companies like Best Buy and Google. It’s all thanks to RDFa, code that is inserted into the HTML of web pages to add extra meaning. The increasing usage of RDFa was one of the main themes at the recent Semantic Technology conference in … Read more
Yesterday we wrote about the increasing usage of Semantic Web technologies by large commercial companies like Facebook, Google and Best Buy. The Semantic Web is a Web of added meaning, which ultimately enables smarter and more personalized web apps to be built. In this post we explore how a leading U.S. retailer, Best Buy, is … Read more
At the Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco last week, I met up with two W3C representatives to discuss the current state of the Semantic Web – a Web of added meaning and structured data. W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, is the official standards organization of the Web and is led by Sir Tim … Read more
At the Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco today, Google gave an update of its rich snippets initiative – which adds extra information to Google search results. For example, showing restaurant review ratings. It’s an experimental Semantic Web feature, but today’s update shows that usage is increasing and Google wants to ramp it up significantly. … Read more