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
I first began writing regularly about the Internet of Things about a year ago. Now it’s bubbling up in the mainstream press and we’re also beginning to see web apps that are attempting to reach, if not quite a mainstream audience yet, then certainly the iPhone and Android-toting geek community. We’ve moved beyond the cutesy … Read more
I’m pleased to announce that long-time ReadWriteWeb blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick is officially now our Co-Editor, sharing editor duties with yours truly Richard MacManus. When I founded this site almost 7 years to the day, I was the lone blogger. Today ReadWriteWeb has a team of around 20; and in particular our writing team has grown … Read more
In our recent posts about Structured Data, we’ve emphasized that most of the current initiatives have been around uploading new data to the Web – whatever the format. The U.S. and U.K. governments have led the way with their ‘open data’ websites, but much of that data isn’t ‘linked’ yet. In other words, it’s online … Read more
At the end of last week, we posted an open thread asking what application you’d build (or would like someone else to build) using linked data or open data. The thread was inspired by Georgi Kobilarov. In this post, we list 10 of the best ideas we received. A number of the suggested apps were … Read more
In the emerging Internet of Things, everyday objects are becoming networked. Clothing is no exception. It’s still early days for Web-enabled clothes – the best example so far is the Nike+ running shoe, which contains sensors that connect to the user’s iPod. But expect to see everything from your shirt to your underwear networked in … Read more
Yesterday we looked at DASH7, a wireless sensor networking standard that may play an important part in next-generation mobile services – including location-based services, the Internet of Things and social networking. In this post we analyze some use cases for DASH7, which also point to where the Mobile Web is heading. We’ll look at how … Read more
Think your smartphone is cool now? Wait till it gets RFID chips, then it’ll truly be ‘smart.’ That’s the promise of two emerging RFID-based mobile technologies called NFC and DASH7. We’ve already looked at NFC (Near Field Communication), which holds great promise as an enabler of mobile payments. Today we look at DASH7, a wireless … Read more
Recently we looked at the state of Linked Data in 2010, noting developments such as governments putting public data online and Thomson Reuters putting structure around commercial data using OpenCalais. In a follow-up post, we explained the distinction between Linked Data, Open Data and the Semantic Web. Georgi Kobilarov, who runs a Linked Data startup … Read more
Last month the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab ran an event at the Stanford Business School, called The Internet of Things: Sensors Everywhere. The video of the event was recently put up on YouTube. We’ve embedded the entire hour-long video below, along with a 2-minute video snippet which we think budding entrepreneurs should take note of. If … Read more
You know that a trend is ramping up when big companies begin to namecheck it. It’s happening now with the Internet of Things, a term for when real-world objects connect to the Internet. Senior executives from two major U.S. broadband and telecommunications companies – Verizon and AT&T – plus the CTO of the world’s biggest … Read more
Three years ago we reviewed Martha Stewart’s women’s lifestyle website, marthastewart.com. At that time, April 2007, the site had just undergone a web 2.0 facelift. Martha Stewart 2.0 included more videos, blogging and general community features such as recipe swap functionality and message boards. It planned to add further personalization and community features over 2007. … Read more
Jaron Lanier was a pioneer of “virtual reality” in the early 1980s and in his book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, he makes the case for a more humanistic approach to Internet technology. Lanier rails against web 2.0, which he calls at the start of the book “a torrent of petty designs” and … Read more
One of the emerging trends of the Mobile Web is using your phone to interact with the real world. We’re not just talking about ‘checking in’ to locations, either. There’s a world of more practical functionality that hasn’t yet ramped up in the West – using your phone as a payment device (for example mobile … Read more
Yesterday we summarized some of the main developments in the Linked Data world over the past year. Linked Data is a W3C-backed movement that is all about connecting data sets across the Web. It can be viewed as a subset of the wider Semantic Web movement, which is about adding meaning to the Web. However, … Read more
In May last year we wrote about the state of Linked Data, an official W3C project that aims to connect separate data sets on the Web. Linked Data is a subset of the wider Semantic Web movement, in which data on the Web is encoded with meaning using technologies such as RDF and OWL. The … Read more