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
One of the buzz phrases we’ve heard a lot this year is “data portability”, which means the ability to move your personal data between different applications and vendors. It has its own standards group, called naturally enough DataPortability.org. Some of the big Internet companies have signaled their support for data portability – in January Google … Read more
Last night ReadWriteWeb got its first link on the Yahoo homepage, thanks to Yahoo Buzz – the beta social news service that is letting blogs get coverage on the world’s most trafficked website. Our initial turn on yahoo.com happened late at night, 10pm PST, and lasted around 3.5 hours. It happened to our post about … Read more
The strange saga of Omnidrive continues. On Friday we reported that online storage service Omnidrive, once a market leader, had joined the deadpool after the site’s domain name expired. Further evidence was posted during the weekend by Omnidrive angel investor Clay Cook, who had invested $100,000 into the company. In a scathing post, Cook wrote … Read more
Thank you to our sponsors, for supporting ReadWriteWeb’s mission to provide in-depth coverage of Web Apps, Web Technology Trends, Social Networking & Social Media. To enquire about sponsor slots on ReadWriteWeb, please email us for a Media Kit. We also have opportunities on our network blogs last100, AltSearchEngines and ReadWriteTalk. Here are our current sponsors: … Read more
This month’s Semantic Web Gang podcast, syndicated on ReadWriteTalk and featuring RWW’s Alex Iskold, is up now. The main topic is Bret Taylor’s idea of a Wikipedia for Data, which RWW covered here. The gang (which btw is like a quieter and more polite version of the Gillmor Gang!) looks at the role that semantic … Read more
Here are some of the highlights from the week’s Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side: this week we took a look at our readers’ favorite web apps, we covered the social news space in depth (including posts on digg, Mixx and a new app called BlogRize), we brought you the latest news … Read more
A couple of weeks ago we held a competition, asking you to tell us what web 2.0 apps most excite you currently. We had a great response, with 113 comments. I decided to list each web app mentioned in a spreadsheet and count up the most popular. What surprised me was the number of web … Read more
One of the highlights last week at Web 2.0 Expo was the launch of Microsoft’s new cloud computing play, Live Mesh. Mesh is a new development platform for syncing user data between the desktop and the Web, and across multiple devices (currently just Windows computers, but it’ll support mobile, Mac computers and other devices in … Read more
Since the Web 2.0 Expo last week, two parallel questions are being asked about the current era of the Web: a) Are we about to enter into a recession, and if so does that mean an end to the current ‘web 2.0’ era of innovation in web technology?; b) Why aren’t we (meaning startups) tackling … Read more
In the first real sign that recommendation engine Strands (formally MyStrands) is branching out from mobile and music, the company has announced the acquisition of Expensr, an online personal finance application. Strands is also launching moneyStrands, a personal money management solution. We’ve noted before that Strands is a company to watch, having taken $55m in … Read more
Universal McCann has released a new report on the impact of social media (such as blogs, social networks, online video) on the media landscape. It surveyed 17,000 Internet users worldwide in March 2008. The report found that social media, in particular blogs, are “becoming a more important part of global media consumption for internet users … Read more
Last week trendy micro-blogging service Twitter launched officially in Japan, after the company had “noticed a significant percent of Twitter usage consistently originating from Japan”. At the time of launch, Joi Ito – an investor in Twitter – claimed that Japan usage “was nearly 30% of Twitter earlier on”, but had dropped to “about 13% … Read more
This week was a hectic one, with a number of RWW writers present at the annual Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The big Internet news of the week was the launch of Microsoft’s Live Mesh. Yahoo also announced key support for Social Graph and data portability. In social networking news, MySpace officially opened its … Read more
The ReadWriteWeb team is at the Web 2.0 Expo. Tim O’Reilly opens the Web 2.0 Expo keynotes with a discussion on the opportunities in web 2.0 today. Here are some real-time notes on his session. His main message is to “not follow the headlines” and the hot consumer apps, but go after “big, hard problems”. … Read more
As we wrote last night, the new Live Mesh service that just launched as an invite only “technology preview” is Microsoft’s attempt to tie all of our data together. Live Mesh synchronizes data across multiple devices (currently just Windows computers, but theoretically it will extend to mobile and other devices in the future) as well … Read more