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
Bungee Labs announced today at Web 2.0 Expo that it is expanding its hosting options, and also looking into open source as a way to connect with the developer community. Bungee Labs’ main product is Bungee Connect, an end-to-end, cloud-based development platform for web applications. We covered the launch of the public beta of Connect … Read more
Tonight Microsoft is launching a “tech preview” version of its latest platform, Live Mesh. The new platform is all about connecting devices to the Internet via Windows software. From an end user standpoint, it will enable users to sync their data across multiple devices and share with others. As of now, in preview mode, Live … Read more
I’m at the Alternative Search Engines Day, in San Francisco, an event put on by our network blog AltSearchEngines. We started out with a keynote talk by ASE editor Charles Knight, who noted that alternative search engines only have about 1.7% market share combined. He thinks this is too small, so he wants all of … Read more
On 20 April, 2003, ReadWriteWeb was born. My first post here was appropriately entitled The Read/Write Web and it began: “The World Wide Web in 2003 is beginning to fulfil the hopes that Tim Berners-Lee had for it over 10 years ago when he created it.” At the time I started ReadWriteWeb, web 2.0 hadn’t … Read more
Here are the highlights from the week’s stories on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side, we analyzed the increasing mainstreaming of social news site digg; and we reviewed some awesome new web apps (Grooveshark, SixApart’s BlogIt, Twhirl, Alert Thingy, and others). On web trends, there was a meme this week that declared the Mobile Web dead … Read more
We had a great response to last night’s competition offering 2 full passes to the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo. Over 100 people left a comment telling us their favorite web app(s). Sadly, there can only be 2 winners. They were selected at random, using a cool web app called Random.org. The winners are: comment #79, … Read more
ReadWriteWeb has 2 tickets to next week’s Web 2.0 Expo to give away, courtesy of Technorati. These are full conference passes, worth $1,895 each, so they will get you into every workshop and conference session. To be in with a chance to win one of these passes, all you have to do is enter a … Read more
If you’re a fan of digg, you’ve probably been noticing that tech stories are becoming less and less a feature of the social news site. The reason? Digg is attempting to attract a large mainstream user base. Just how low has tech sunk in digg? We have new data that shows that the number of … Read more
Facebook has just launched a neat new trend mapping tool, called Lexicon. Similar to Google Trends, it allows you to create a trend graph for different words and (two-word) phrases on Facebook Walls. It has a surprisingly slick UI too, with the scroll bar enabling you to zoom in and out to get different views … Read more
Just launched today is a new Twitter mashup called Twitlinks. This one aggregates the latest links posted to Twitter by tech industry pundits. The end result is a homepage that kind of resembles Techmeme, only without the threading of topics. It may even be the only news aggregator that is faster than Techmeme in delivering … Read more
April is usually a busy month on the Web conference schedule, with my personal highlight being the Web 2.0 Expo. Since 2005 I’ve never missed a TechWeb / O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference; and this one will be no exception. In fact there will be a number of ReadWriteWeb authors roaming around, with Marshall Kirkpatrick, Josh … Read more
Our network blog AltSearchEngines is holding an invitation only gathering of search engines on Monday 21 April, in San Francisco. This private event, called simply the AltSearchEngines Get Together is being held the day before the Web 2.0 Expo. The event is targeted at the hundreds of alternative search engines that Charles Knight covers, so … Read more
Here are some of the highlights from the week’s Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. The big news was Google App Engine – we provided extensive coverage and analysis. Also this week we looked into further use cases for Twitter, we analyzed the pros and cons of offline access to web apps, as well as why … Read more
Music futurist Gerd Leonhard has just released an informative video explaining what music 2.0 is and how the music industry should change to adapt to ‘web 2.0’ principles. The video is embedded below. Some of the themes are that control doesn’t work (e.g. DRM and trying to control networking) and that music is meant to … Read more
Today there’s been a sensational claim by 2 Gartner analysts that “Windows is collapsing”. In Computerworld, Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald are quoted as saying that “Microsoft has not responded to the market, is overburdened by nearly two decades of legacy code and decisions, and faces serious competition on a whole host of … Read more