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 Economist published a short article about the Semantic Web today, picking up on apps we’ve covered here many times – like Reuters Open Calais, Twine, Hakia and AdaptiveBlue. But one app right at the end caught my eye, as I’d not heard of it before: Qitera. Its homepage describes it as “a next-generation information … Read more
There has been a lot of talk on the web over the last few days about Google App Engine. We’ve analyzed it here on ReadWriteWeb. Now it’s your turn to have your say. We’ve created, via a new app from Impact Games, an interactive game that will let you model Google App Engine’s impact in … Read more
One of the big trends in 2008 has been the emergence of what I call Semantic Apps – a kind of ‘Web 2.0 Meets Semantic Web‘ app typified by startups like Twine, Hakia, Quintura, Powerset and others. Another growing trend is health 2.0, web-based health apps and services. What’s interesting is that those two trends … Read more
Earlier today our Josh Catone interviewed 37Signal founder Jason Fried about the striking similarities between one of Google’s App Engine demos, HuddleChat (a real-time chat application) and the Campfire app from 37Signals. Fried told RWW that “we’re flattered Google thinks Campfire is a great product, we’re just disappointed that they stooped so low to basically … Read more
Google has just launchedGoogle App Engine, “a developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure.” This will allow startups to use Google’s web servers, APIs, and other developer tools to build a web app on top of. Google clearly has the scale and smarts to provide this platform service to … Read more
The latest ReadWriteTalk podcast is up and it’s a chat with Eric Gilmore, Senior Product Manager for Office Live at Microsoft. In particular Eric talks about Office Live Workspace, a free web-based extension of Microsoft Office that lets you access your documents online and share your work with others. Our own Sarah Perez recently compared … 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
Here are some of the highlights from the week’s Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. This week we brought you ‘The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients’, we explained why Seesmic + Twhirl is a Vision of the Web’s Future, we analysed the latest developments in MySpace music and Flickr, and we peeked into the … Read more
Our network blog AltSearchEngines has just launched a great new sub-site, called The Search Race. It is a brand new format for the monthly Top 100 Alternative Search Engines, starting with the April list today. The Search Race is a fully linked version of the Top 100, a long-requested feature. But even better, the community … Read more
Our network blog has just announced an annual ‘Day Without Google’, starting tomorrow April 1st. ASE editor Charles Knight writes: “All we’re asking is that for One Day you try one of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines”. He implores us to “Choose one, choose several, but for One Day give the Alternative search engines … Read more
Following on from our Q&A; with Benjamin Joffe about how Facebook compares to top Asian social networks, Kaiser Kuo from Ogilvy China Digital Watch reported today that Facebook users in China “received a message on their main pages this morning asking them to help out with the translation of the site into simplified Chinese”. Kaiser … Read more
When it comes to keeping track of Mobile Web trends and products, Rudy De Waele has his finger constantly on the pulse. This month Rudy gave a presentation at the Plugg Conference in Brussels about Mobile 2.0. It was an update to the one we featured in September ’07 and as usual it is a … Read more
One of my co-presenters at this month’s Media 08 event in Sydney was Benjamin Joffe, Managing Director at Asia Internet consultancy +8* and Co-Founder of MobileMonday Beijing. At Media 08 Benjamin discussed the leading social networks in Asia. In particular he compared global leader Facebook with Cyworld, Mixi and QQ. According to Benjamin, Facebook is … Read more
Today’s winning comment comes from Alex Iskold’s must-read post Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies. In the post Alex identifies the patterns that are beginning to emerge in the Semantic Web, classifies the different trends, and examines what the future holds. One of the comments to the post introduced us to the term … Read more
The big news today was the announcement of the OpenSocial Foundation, a joint effort by Google, Yahoo! and MySpace’s Newscorp. As we reported earlier today, the creation of an open, non-profit organization will assuage concerns about whether Google is exercising leadership or control with OpenSocial. But there are other concerns. In the press call, which … Read more