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
Last week was arguably a tipping point for FriendFeed, the lifestreaming app that aggregates all of your social feeds together. FriendFeed first came to our attention in early February, when Sean Ammirati interviewed the founders on our podcast show ReadWriteTalk. At the end of February FriendFeed officially launched, then at SXSW it gained momentum, and … Read more
Today’s winning comment comes from Brad Garland, from our post Health Care at SXSW – Health Getting Hot With Tech Crowd. Brad asked an open question: “Why can’t we do an OpenEMR system like we are doing for authentication (OpenID). Be able to transfer and control your medical record personally instead of having the doctors … Read more
Yahoo Buzz is a social media experiment by Yahoo! that is currently in a closed beta. We found out today what kind of boost Buzz is giving the current selected blogs and news sources – Muhammad Saleem wrote that it is giving publishers huge bumps in both traffic and comments. Muhammad, you’ll recall, wrote on … Read more
We have 2 comment of the day prizes to give out today, and they both come from our post Ten Sites for Finding Wonderful Things. Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick, it was a list of 10 “online bricolage” websites – i.e. the art of assembling diverse found objects. Sites like Kottke.org (which recently celebrated 10 years … Read more
Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. It’s been a busy week, with a RWW interview with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, iPhone analysis aplenty, a special look at Web visualization, reviews of Semantic Apps Twine and Reuters Open Calais, and much more. And don’t forget to click through to our website … Read more
This week there’s been a fair bit of action in the Internet TV sector, with announcements from Hulu, Joost and TiVo. Our network blog last100 has been covering the action. This week Hulu – the online video project from Newscorp and NBC/Universal, with participation by Sony, MGM and others (our previous coverage) – launched to … Read more
Over the past couple of days we’ve had two in-depth posts on the theme of visualization. This is one of our trends to watch this year; and so these posts are well worth your time reading (and viewing!). Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote User Interfaces Rapidly Adjusting to Information Overload and Sarah Perez wrote The Best Tools … Read more
The big news today is that US portal giant AOL acquired leading social networking site Bebo for $850 million. There has been a lot of coverage about the business aspects of this deal, but from a product view I don’t think this will make much headway for either company. Bebo is a distant third to … Read more
Today’s winning comment goes to Kamyar, from our post The Beast of Redmond is Roaring (& Thinking) Again. Kamyar’s comment was a super-geeky reference to the classic sci-fi novel and movie, Dune. I’m not sure I can picture Sting as Ray Ozzie, but still it was a nicely gratuitous sci-fi reference. We’re fans of that … Read more
MyStrands is an ambitious start-up. It has so far raised $55 Million dollars in its quest to “lead the social recommendation industry” (the words the company used in its last funding announcement in December). We at ReadWriteWeb are following the trend of recommendations closely – it was one of the 5 major trends we outlined … Read more
YouTube’s announcement tonight wasn’t higher quality videos (yet), but a set of new APIs and expanded features. YouTube now describes itself as “an open, general purpose, video services platform, available for use by just about any third-party website, desktop application, or consumer device.” There’s a video embedded below with YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and others … Read more
Today Marshall Kirkpatrick posted a less than favorable review of Twine, the semantic web knowledge management system that is currently in private beta. Marshall made some great points; and ultimately his post will serve as both excellent feedback for Twine’s developers and a wakeup call that this Semantic Web stuff is hard. However Twine should … Read more
Today Alltop, an aggregator of RSS feeds, launched. It’s a very similar product to one of my daily refreshes, OriginalSignal. Only Alltop covers a much broader range of topics, 40 in total. Alltop’s selection of feeds is savvy and wide-ranging – and I’m not just saying that because ReadWriteWeb is the first feed listed in … Read more
A month ago we wrote about Reuters launching an API called Open Calais, a technology that “does a semantic markup on unstructured HTML documents – recognizing people, places, companies, and events.” I mentioned Calais in my Media08 presentation last week entitled Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond. It generated interest in the media-focused audience … Read more
Alex Iskold’s post from last night, Why Apple Will Dominate Next Gen Computing, has generated over 70 comments as of writing. Many of them challenged the article – but it was also interesting to see some commenters fact-checking other comments 😉 The comment of the day comes from “IT”, who was skeptical about “the level … Read more