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
Forrester released a report today about the ‘community platforms’ market. They evaluated nine vendors, concluding that Jive Software and Telligent Systems “lead the pack because of their strong administrative and platform features.” KickApps and Pluck were also commended, for enabling large Web sites to scale quickly with social features. Awareness, Lithium Technologies, and Mzinga were … Read more
This week’s RWW Live podcast show was on the topic of how startups can navigate through the choppy waters of the current economy. We’ve already posted today on a two year old life-story repository startup called Dandelife, which is struggling – although we were able to draw some lessons from that. But it’s also good … Read more
At the end of last year we presented our list of the top 10 Semantic Web Apps of 2008. ReadWriteWeb reader Zoltán Andrejkovics wrote in to us afterwards, suggesting that we do a post looking at what Semantic Web apps we’d like to see emerge in 2009. Zoltán gave us 5 apps he wants to … Read more
If you’ve ever wondered how the Internet was born, but can’t be bothered reading a whole book on the subject, check out this short animated documentary from Milah Bilgil. Entitled History of the internet, it does a great job explaining time-sharing, file-sharing, arpanet and internet. The video uses a new type of info-graphic called PICOL … Read more
A new report from Forrester presents a cost analysis of cloud-based email systems in enterprises, such as Google Apps or Yahoo!’s Zimbra. In the report, Forrester argues that cloud-based email services are cheaper than running email on-premise for all companies with less than 15,000 employees. What’s more, Google Apps is significantly cheaper than both on-premise … Read more
At the Macworld 2009 keynote today, Apple announced that by the end of this quarter, all 10 million songs available on iTunes will be DRM free [Digital Rights Management]. As of today, 8 million songs will be DRM free, with the other 2 million done by end of Q1 09. This is long overdue, especially … Read more
In the first RWW Live of 2009, we tackle an issue that is of vital importance to all startups right now – how to navigate through the choppy waters of the current economy. Join the ReadWriteWeb authors and special guests on our live podcast show. Our guests are entrepreneurs from BrightKite and Zoho, two startups … Read more
Every year old-school web design guru Jakob Nielsen releases a survey of the world’s top Intranets. This year’s report has some interesting comments on the use of ‘web 2.0’ techniques in company intranets. However Nielsen continues to take petty shots at the latest social web technologies. We were critical of this last year, but frankly … Read more
A red colored iPhone has been on the rumor mill for some time, but today French blogger Steve Hemmerstoffer sent us some photos of one. He told us via email that the source was anonymous. We’ve heard already this year about a pink iPhone hitting eBay, which Engadget thinks was the result of “some OEM … Read more
It’s time for our annual predictions post, in which the ReadWriteWeb authors look forward to what 2009 might bring in the world of Web technology and new media. Looking back at our 2008 Web predictions, we got some of them right! “The big Internet companies will [embrace] open standards” (Google, Yahoo and others did this); … Read more
One our favorite blogs about consumer Internet trends, TrendsSpotting, has just published a presentation about social media trends. The predictions were gathered from social media influencers, including ReadWriteWeb. Check out the slides below, and also our post from yesterday 2009: Predictions Across the Web. And stay tuned for ReadWriteWeb’s own annual predictions post, it’s coming … Read more
For the final RWW Live show of the year today, the ReadWriteWeb writers and a couple of special guests got together to review the year in Web technology. Joining host Sean Ammirati were Marshall Kirkpatrick, Sarah Perez and Richard MacManus from ReadWriteWeb. We had two special guests who joined the call while we were live: … Read more
Over December we’ve published ten top 10 lists of the top products of 2008. We intend to open these lists up for public voting in 2009, to tap into the wisdom of the intelligent crowd that reads our site. But for now, you’ll have to make do with the choices of us here at ReadWriteWeb. … Read more
Every year we do a review of the top Internet companies, to identify the ones that had the biggest impact. Last week we announced that Apple was our choice for Best BigCo of 2008. Today we’re announcing Best LittleCo and Most Promising Company, as selected by the ReadWriteWeb writers. There were a number of small … Read more
2008 has seen a proliferation of new Web platforms, including a few major ones built using open standards. In this final instalment of our series of top products of 2008, we choose the top 10 Web platforms of the year. We’ve written a lot of times about platforms for the Web. A web platform can … Read more