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
During my recent trip to Boston, I had the opportunity to visit MIT. At the end of a long day of meetings with various MIT tech masterminds, I made my way to the funny shaped building (see photo right-below) where the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and its director Tim Berners-Lee work. Berners-Lee is of … Read more
Two of the more interesting products in the ‘Internet of Things,’ a.k.a. real world objects connected to the Internet, are Pachube and Arduino. We profiled Pachube (pronounced “patch-bay”) in May; it’s an open source platform enabling you to connect sensor data to the Web. Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform, which we briefly profiled … Read more
At the recent SemTech conference in San Jose, I sat down with Wolfram|Alpha‘s Russell Foltz-Smith. Wolfram|Alpha bills itself as a “computational knowledge engine,” a nerdy and unfortunately not very intuitive description. Because it’s hard to grok, most people have categorized Wolfram|Alpha as a new type of search engine. The site got a lot of press … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we analyze the latest changes to Facebook’s privacy controls, investigate trolling on FriendFeed, explore the impact of push notifications on the iPhone, review Firefox 3.5, check out Google’s update to Blog Search, and more. We also update you with … Read more
Peachtree Media Advisors has just released their latest report on digital media mergers and acquisitions. We posted their 2008 report back in January, and this is a mid-year 2009 update to that. According to Peachtree, there were 342 digital media transactions in the first half of 2009, which was 12.3% below the number of transactions … Read more
Tom Tague from Thomson Reuters’ OpenCalais team did a keynote speech today at SemTech in San Jose. His presentation was a wonderful wrapup of current semantic technology trends, and what we can expect over the next few years. To open, he said that where we are now in the evolution of the Web is content … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we cover the latest iPhone announcements from Apple, look at some new real-time web products that we have high hopes for, investigate the impact trolls are having on social media, discuss the sociology of Twitter, and more. We also … Read more
It’s been nearly 4 years since news aggregation site Techmeme (or tech.memeorandum, as it was called back then) launched to the world. Since then it’s grown to be the leading aggregator of tech news in the blogosphere. There have been no shortage of pretenders to the throne over the years, particularly from startups hoping to … Read more
We all love to flip through a glossy, interesting magazine on the plane, in the dentist’s waiting room, or stretched out on the sofa in the evening. However magazines have not been isolated from the troubles that print media are having due to the online world. Many magazines are struggling to survive and some of … Read more
Last week we looked at the emerging world of real-time cellphone data, via the projects of the MIT SENSEeable City Lab. This lab has been producing interesting analysis and visualizations of cellphone data in urban centers, a.k.a. “digital footprints.” We also spoke to Andrea Vaccari, a research associate at SENSEable City Lab, about a project … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we have one of the very first hands-on reviews of Google Wave, we check out the new Microsoft Bing search engine, analyze another new Google product called Squared, look at what applications will be built on top of real-time … Read more
At ReadWriteWeb we’ve been following with interest the projects of the MIT SENSEeable City Lab, which is producing some excellent analysis and visualizations of cellphone data in urban centers. MIT refers to this data as “digital footprints,” because it essentially tracks the movement and sometimes actions of people in an environment. Our most recent post … Read more
Semantic technology company TopQuadrant announced today that NASA is using its semantic application platform, the TopBraid Suite, to “model, organize, integrate and exchange data” within the NASA Constellation Program. The goal of the NASA Constellation Program, announced in 2004, is to explore the solar system – starting with a return to the Moon and ultimately … Read more
Microsoft’s new search engine Bing unexpectedly went live tonight, including a re-direct from http://www.live.com – previously Microsoft’s ‘personalized start page’ destination. So search has usurped a Netvibes-like start page as Microsoft’s default homepage for its web services. In last week’s launch announcement, Bing was being bandied about as Microsoft’s latest attempt to steal market share … Read more
Today we’re debuting two new writers on ReadWriteWeb. Steven Walling is our new writer for the Enterprise channel, while Dana Oshiro takes the reigns of ReadWriteStart. Both of these fantastic new hires will be focused on our channels. Steven becomes lead writer for the still nascent ReadWriteEnterprise, which unfortunately had a false start a month … Read more