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
BlueKai is an online marketing firm that provides data to marketers, ad networks and publishers. The main purpose of this data, held in a repository called the BlueKai Data Exchange, is to target ads to consumers. BlueKai claims to have now aggregated “intent data” from over 160 million unique users on e-commerce, online travel agency … Read more
In one of ReadWriteWeb’s longest-running traditions, every year we review the top Internet companies and their impact over the past 12 months. Today we’re announcing the 6th annual Best BigCo, a.k.a. big Internet company. Next week we’ll announce Best LittleCo and Most Promising Company. In 2008 the Best BigCo went to Apple, due largely to … Read more
Morgan Stanley has released a couple of bulky documents about the mobile Internet: ‘The Mobile Internet Report,’ a 424-page report which explores eight major themes; and ‘The Mobile Internet Report Key Themes,’ a 659-slide presentation that drills down on thoughts covered in the report. We’ve embedded both documents below. Perhaps the most remarkable statement in … Read more
Over December we have published our best Web products of 2009 over ten posts. This week we’ve opened up our selections for you to vote on. The poll is embedded below and we invite you to select your favorite web products of 2009. You can vote for up to 10 products. If you don’t see … Read more
In my recent post about the rise of content farms like Demand Media and the current incarnation of AOL, I posited that Google (and search in general) risks becoming less relevant as the Web gets drowned in lesser quality content. This is due to the scale at which these content farms are operating at – … Read more
Over December we have published ten Top 10 lists for the best products of 2009, in categories ranging from Consumer Web Apps to Real-Time Technologies. Now we’re opening up our selections for you to vote on. We’ve embedded a poll below, with all 100 products that the ReadWriteWeb team selected. We invite you to vote … Read more
I’ve been writing a lot about so-called ‘content farms’ in recent months – companies like Demand Media and Answers.com which create thousands of pieces of content per day and are making a big impact on the Web. Both of those two companies are now firmly inside the top 20 Web properties in the U.S., on … Read more
German company apnoti.com has today launched what it claims is the world’s first mobile price search engine with integrated barcode scanner. It’s an iPhone app called iBARCODE, which enables users to scan product barcodes and find the best prices. It currently only works in the U.S., U.K, Germany and France. To scan, the user simply … Read more
Jack Herrick knows a bit about Demand Media, one of the top 20 web properties in the U.S. and the subject of several ReadWriteWeb articles about sites that are pumping thousands of pieces of content into the Web every day. Herrick sold the business he founded, eHow, to Demand Media in 2006. eHow is one … Read more
2009 has been a turning point for the Internet of Things, when real world objects (such as lights, cars and packages) get connected to the Internet. This trend has added a significant amount of new data to the Web, so for that reason alone it is an important development. Having said that, many of the … Read more
Last week Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt wrote a guest article for the Wall St Journal, discussing the need for new forms of newspaper publishing to replace the old print paradigm. Another not-so-new paradigm, but one more suited to the networked computer age we live in today, is Vannevar Bush‘s 1945 pre-hypertext concept the … Read more
Favrd, a site which aggregated the most popular starred tweets, has closed down. The site was a favorite of Twitter humorists, people who use Twitter mainly to express their wit. Favrd was the first of its kind to repurpose Twitter favorites (stars) into an aggregation site, where users could see who had “faved” their tweets, … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – the first and still the best weekly newsletter for tech news and reviews – we present our end-of-year series profiling the best web products of 2009. We tell you our picks for Best Mobile Apps, Best Consumer Apps, Best Semantic Web Apps, and more. Also in this … Read more
International courier giant Fedex has just released a new tracking device and web service for packages. Called SenseAware, it keeps tabs on the temperature, location and other vital signs of a package – including when it’s opened and whether it was tampered with along the way. Fedex is running a trial period of about a … Read more
2009 has seen a lot of Semantic Web and structured data activity. Much of it has been driven by Linked Data, a W3C project which gained momentum this year. According to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, Linked Data is a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself. We’ve gone … Read more