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
The University of Washington has announced two new research projects that will utilize cloud computing platforms from Internet companies such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM. According to the press release published on Genetic Engineering News, the University of Washington has won grants from the National Science Foundation to fund projects examining ocean climate simulations … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we look at the future of mobile phones in light of Google’s Android OS, examine the future of journalism, discuss how sensors are becoming more a feature of social networks, advise you when not to use social media, analyze … Read more
The integration of sensors with social networks will lead to real-time data and more useful web apps. In recent posts we reviewed an MIT experiment called WikiCity, that gathered real-time location data from mobile phones in Rome and graphically mapped trends from it. We then looked at a more commercial product doing similar real-time location … Read more
Information Architect firm iA is at the final stages of its latest ‘Web Trend Map’, an annual visualization that shows prominent Internet trends, products, companies and people. This year ReadWriteWeb gets a spot in the map, which we’re all very proud of here in the RWW virtual office. You can see a full blow up … Read more
Yesterday we discussed MIT’s project WikiCity, which monitors location data in cities via mobile sensors and creates visualizations from that. That project comes out of the SENSEable City lab at MIT and in our post we questioned whether there is any practical value in WikiCity currently or if it is simply “info porn”. In this … Read more
UPDATE, 15 April 2009: Sadly this business relationship has not worked out as planned, therefore ReadWriteWeb and Susan Scrupski have decided to part ways. As Susan wrote on her blog this week, “It was important to make a clean cut sooner rather than later. We have all parted friends and hope to continue to work … Read more
Andrea Vaccari, from the SENSEable City lab at MIT, spoke at ETech recently about how cities are being transformed by mobile Web technologies. He described MIT’s project WikiCity, which monitors cell phone traces in Rome and creates visualizations from them. The goal is ultimately to make this data useful to actual people, in real time. … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter where the top stories of the week are summarized, we present highlights from our coverage of the Web 2.0 Expo (held this week in San Francisco), review the new Skype app for iPhone, discuss the local / mobile Web with a panel of experts in our … Read more
One of the big trends on the web is more and more location aware / sensitive web applications. Increasingly powerful mobile devices are enabling this. In the latest episode of RWW Live, today at 3.30pm PST, we’ll talk about how the Web is evolving to include more location aware applications and what barriers are still … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we discuss web apps that have stood the ’30 day test’ for our writers, analyze the past, present and future uses of the Twitter platform, look into the phenomenon of “ghost twittering”, review the latest changes to the Facebook … Read more
In yesterday’s post about my recent trip to Mozilla HQ, we looked at where Mozilla’s Chief Innovation Officer, Chris Beard, thinks Firefox is heading. Mozilla’s vision for Firefox is for the browser to help users navigate and manage an increasingly complex world – something akin to the concept of intelligent agents. Part of this vision … Read more
In my recent visit to Silicon Valley, I got the chance to visit the Mozilla headquarters. Among others at the organization, I spoke to Chris Beard – Mozilla’s Chief Innovation Officer and the person overseeing its efforts to bring new concepts to the browser, a.k.a. Mozilla Labs. We discussed where Firefox is heading and how … Read more
In this latest installment in our series on recommendation engines, we look at ChoiceStream – a recommendations vendor which counts Overstock, Borders and AT&T among its high profile clients. ChoiceStream has recently turned its attention to using recommendations in online advertising, and in this post we look at how the company is doing this. The … Read more
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we cover the iPhone OS 3.0 announcement, review the highlights from Microsoft’s MIX event, look at Facebook’s new privacy controls, check out some cutting edge web-based books, analyze the latest social media and Twitter stats, and more. Also we … Read more
One of the most pleasing Web trends we’re seeing in 2009 is the increasing penetration of web apps into the real world. Web applications for healthcare is one example. We wrote about a new Web-based Radiology Theatre built by IBM yesterday and today we discuss an iPhone app that helps people with diabetes. At yesterday’s … Read more