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
Leading online music app last.fm has released its most popular songs, albums and artists of 2008. The rankings come from last.fm’s database, based on number of listeners. The music had to be released in 2008 to qualify for the charts. The Top 10 tracks is absolutely dominated by Coldplay’s Viva la Vida, with 6 songs … Read more
It’s time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. On the trends side, we took an in-depth look at the emerging world of open social networks. We pondered: which of Facebook Connect and OpenID will be more successful? And we explained why “distributed social networking” is a trend to watch, with … Read more
Distributed social networking – where users can connect their profile, friends and other data across multiple sites – is still a relatively new concept and not fully developed. There are plenty of companies and projects vying to be a major piece of the distributed social networking puzzle. The big Internet companies have initiatives such as … Read more
In 2008 we saw the Semantic Web gain traction, giving us plenty of choice when selecting the 10 best Semantic Web products of 2008. This is the first in a series of posts we’ll publish over December, listing our choices for the top web products of the year. Then at the end of December, we’ll … Read more
A couple of weeks ago we celebrated the first birthday of Google’s OpenSocial project, an open API framework for social networks and websites. Google’s OpenSocial Blog recently presented some statistics, including that OpenSocial now reaches nearly 675 M registered users and there are 7,500 applications. What’s interesting about these numbers is that the single largest … Read more
I’m very pleased to announce that Bernard Lunn has joined ReadWriteWeb full-time as our Chief Operating Officer. Starting today, Bernard will assume responsibility for most of the non-editorial functions of our business – sales, business development and other operational matters. This allows me to re-focus on leading our editorial, including doing more writing! I will … Read more
://URLFAN is an indexing service which ranks websites by popularity, based on blog mentions. It’s been around for a while, but we think it’s reached the point now where it’s a very useful tool to measure influence on the Internet. ://URLFAN is similar to Alexa and its measurement of popularity is reminiscent of Google’s PageRank. … Read more
It’s time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. On the trends side, we gave you an overview of health 2.0 and followed up with a RWW Live podcast on the topic. We also looked at the state of the art in recommendation technologies and offered some tips for the Internet … Read more
5 years ago, before this blog was a media business, I participated in NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month. It’s an annual creative writing project, in which participants try to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. I did it in November 2003 and documented it in ReadWriteWeb. While the resulting work … Read more
Every year IBM releases a “Next Five in Five” list, a list of innovations that “have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years”. This is the third such list, and it mentions a “Talking Web” among the 5 items. You will talk to the Web and … Read more
On Monday we reviewed the state of health 2.0 and it was also the topic of this week’s RWW Live, our live podcast show. At the end of the podcast, I asked all the panelists to list their favorite health 2.0 app (about the 58:30 mark if you want to listen to it). I’ve listed … Read more
One year ago we ran a contest asking you to tell us your favorite Mobile Web apps. From the resulting comments there were 5 Mobile Web apps that clearly stood out, with multiple mentions: Gmail Java app for mobile phone, Google Maps for Mobile, Opera Mini, Fring, Shozu. Well, a lot has changed in the … Read more
We have been tracking the so-called ‘health 2.0’ trend for some time now. We’ve covered the top health web apps, the trends to watch in health 2.0, and the latest industry stats. And this morning we published a Health 2.0 update. So in this week’s episode of RWW Live, to be broadcast live at 3.30pm … Read more
One year ago, I discovered that I had contracted Type 1 Diabetes. I was 36 at that point and it’s relatively rare for someone of my age to suddenly get Type 1 Diabetes – indeed they used to call this form of diabetes “juvenile diabetes”, because it mostly occurs in children. So it was quite … Read more
It’s time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. On the trends side, we pondered the future of YouTube, analyzed mobile messaging trends, looked into a new search innovation from Google, and more. On the product side, we checked in – one year later – with 10 Semantic Apps we are … Read more