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
Earlier today we reported that Posterous, a popular minimalist blogging service, had added the ability for its users to import their Tumblr content. Tumblr is a competing ‘light blogging’ service – the market leader in fact. Other similar services include Soup.io, Noovo, Vox, Profilactic and even WordPress.com and Blogger.com are used for this purpose (although … Read more
Since it was first unveiled to ReadWriteWeb back in October 2007, Semantic Web application Twine has traveled a rocky road. The product is a knowledge management service, in practical terms similar to social bookmarking site Delicious. However, almost from the start there have been vocal critics of Twine. The latest critique is a scathing post … Read more
Last week we ran a series of posts outlining the 5 biggest Internet trends of this year: Structured Data, Real-Time Web, Personalization, Mobile Web / Augmented Reality, Internet of Things. Effectively this was ReadWriteWeb’s State of the Web 2009. We’ve now compiled the main points into a single presentation, available on Slideshare and embedded below. … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we analyze the 5 biggest trends of 2009 on the Web, review the iTunes and iPhone announcements made by Apple during the week, tell you about a new WordPress feature that makes blogs more real-time, and more. … Read more
This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the 5 biggest Web trends of 2009. So far we’ve explored these trends: Structured Data, The Real-Time Web, Personalization, Mobile Web / Augmented Reality. The fifth and final part of our series is about the Internet of Things, when real world objects (such as fridges, … Read more
A month ago we reported that Facebook was beta testing a ‘lite’ version of its popular social networking site. http://lite.facebook.com has just become available to U.S. users. The lite version offers users a “faster, simpler version of Facebook.” Judging from what we have seen so far, Facebook Lite turns Facebook into a very Twitter-like experience. … Read more
This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the 5 biggest Web trends of 2009. So far we’ve explored these trends: Structured Data, The Real-Time Web, Personalization. The fourth part of our series is on Mobile Web. We’re including Augmented Reality in this category, as we think it’s a key element of where … Read more
A new service called TweepML just launched that makes it easy to create and share groups of Twitter users. It’s more than just a grouping service though, TweepML is also an open extensible format. What OPML is to RSS, TweepML is to Twitter. Groups are of course one of the core features of social software, … Read more
This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the 5 biggest Web trends of 2009. Our first post was about Structured Data, our second about The Real-Time Web. The third part of our series is on Personalization. Personalization has long been a buzzword on the Internet. With the glut of information on the … Read more
This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the 5 biggest, most cutting edge Web trends to come out of 2009. We’re posting one trend analysis per day. Then at the end of the week we’ll publish a major update to our standard presentation about web technology trends. Our opening post was about … Read more
This week ReadWriteWeb will run a series of posts detailing what we think are the 5 biggest, most cutting edge Web trends to come out of 2009. We’ll be posting one trend analysis per day. Then at the end of the week we’ll publish a major update to our standard presentation about web technology trends. … Read more
Today I spotted a contextual advert within an email thread in Gmail. Usually these ‘sponsored links’ are displayed in a separate pane on the right-hand side of Gmail – i.e. outside of the actual email content. But this places the ad squarely within the content of the email thread. It’s possible this has been around … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we review the state of smart cards around the world, update you on the latest Augmented Reality news, ask whether eReaders are being priced too high, analyze Google’s Chrome OS browser plans, present our hands-on impressions of … Read more
This week we’re looking at Smart Cards, which have proliferated across the world mainly as a form of electronic payment for public transportation. Earlier this week we profiled Japan’s cutting edge Suica Card and London’s Oyster Card. Today we look at a widely used smart card that has been in service since 1997: the Octopus … Read more
At the SemTech conference in June I met with William Mougayar, founder and CEO of a semantic news platform called Eqentia. At the time the product was in development, but it is officially launching today. In a nutshell, Eqentia aggregates content into topics using semantic technology. In that respect it is similar to OpenCalais (our … Read more