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’m pleased to announce a new executive appointment to ReadWriteWeb, our new Chief Operating Officer Sean Ammirati. Based in Pittsburgh, PA, Sean has been an occasional writer on ReadWriteWeb since March 2007 and hosted our podcast show ReadWriteTalk. Prior to becoming ReadWriteWeb’s COO, Sean was Co-Founder & CEO at venture-backed startup mSpoke. He’s also been … Read more
Recently I was the keynote speaker at the Unlimited Potential W2W (Wellington to the World) event in Wellington, New Zealand. The topic of my presentation was running a virtual company. In the presentation, written by our Marketing Manager Elyssa Pallai, I spoke about the unique nature of ReadWriteWeb’s virtual business model and culture. Watch the … Read more
Last week we surveyed you, the ReadWriteWeb community, about your favorite mobile applications. We asked for your top five mobile apps and ended up with nearly 200 different mobile apps in the post and comments! Today we reveal the full results, including the most popular mobile apps of our tech-savvy readers. Earlier today our resident … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we analyze a list of the most influential websites in the world, look back on the past decade of e-commerce, suggest a list of products that Twitter might like to acquire, review a collection of Thanksgiving web … Read more
A year ago we polled you, the ReadWriteWeb community, on your favorite mobile apps. It’s become an annual tradition to run this survey, so in this post we’re collecting your top 5 lists for 2009. To get you inspired, the ReadWriteWeb team have listed their personal favorites below. We first ran this poll in November … Read more
A year ago we profiled an oddly-named service called ://URLFAN, which we concluded was a good ‘Influence Index’ for the Web. ://URLFAN ranks websites by popularity, based on blog mentions. Unlike analytics services like Alexa or Compete, ://URLFAN doesn’t measure website traffic. It’s similar to Technorati, only ://URLFAN ranks all websites and not just blogs. … Read more
Last night we wrote about Forrester’s prediction that online holiday retail sales will grow 8% this year to $44.7 billion. comScore had similar numbers about the growth of online retail – toy web sites grew 9% in October, as did the retail apparel segment. Online personal finance service Mint.com has joined the festive statistics parade, … Read more
Yesterday we reviewed the past decade in online retailing. Today we look at some forward-looking statistics about e-commerce. In particular we analyze the upcoming holiday season and how online retailers can expect to fare. Amazon.com was founded in 1995, but it famously didn’t make its first annual profit until 2003. Those days of struggle for … Read more
Over the past decade, Amazon.com and eBay have continued to dominate the online retail market in the United States. However, there have been signs that more social and distributed forms of online shopping are gaining traction. eBay, in particular, is beginning to lose ground. In this post, we review the past decade of e-commerce and … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we report on President Obama’s (non)-use of Twitter, take a look at the past decade in the media industry, review the latest statistics about blogging, question if Oxford Dictionary should’ve chosen “unfriend” as its word of the … Read more
HP Labs has joined the race to build an infrastructure for the emerging Internet of Things. The giant computing and IT services company has announced a project that aims to be a “Central Nervous System for the Earth” (CeNSE). It’s a research and development program to build a planetwide sensing network, using billions of “tiny, … Read more
It’s November 2009 and we’re nearing the end of a decade. It’s been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. The newspaper industry has been particularly affected by the Web. Over the past 10 years, news media has undergone a seachange akin to the invention of the … Read more
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web, has embarked on a trip through Africa on behalf of the non-profit Web Foundation – which today announced two new projects. The Web Foundation exists to bridge the ‘digital divide’ in Internet usage. Only about 25% of the world population uses the Web today, however more than … Read more
Yesterday we wrote about how Demand Media produces 4,000 new pieces of content every day – and whether it can sustain quality at that scale. There was vigorous discussion about the quality issue in the comments, including from some of Demand Media’s thousands of freelance writers. In this follow-up post, we look at the type … Read more
In August we reviewed Demand Media, one of the largest producers of content on the Web today. Wired Magazine recently compared Demand Media’s content business to Henry Ford’s production line for cars. Demand Media currently produces 4,000 new pieces of content a day. What’s more, it’s increasingly syndicating this content to media sites outside of … Read more