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
In our post Beware of Freeconomics, Alex Iskold explained why the ‘free’ economy proposed by Wired’s Chris Anderson may not be a bed of roses. Commenter SJones had an interesting ‘bee’ metaphor that furthered the discussion. “It is not enough to build a killer app”, said SJones, “they [startups] have to build a killer honey … Read more
We have two winning comments today, from Michael Lambie and Vibhu Norby. Michael’s comment was on our post The Best Things About Adobe’s AIR Platform. He suggested that AIR could be used to create an offline browser. Vibhu’s comment was on Microsoft: ROI Measurement is Broken – he thinks that “Microsoft is looking a step … Read more
Alex Iskold just posted Rethinking Recommendation Engines, a product type that we here at ReadWriteWeb have explored a lot over the past year or so. In this follow-up post, we present 10 recommendation engines that we like. And we don’t include the obvious ones, such as Amazon, Netflix, last.fm, Pandora. So it’s not a ‘top … Read more
Thank you to our sponsors, for supporting ReadWriteWeb’s mission to provide in-depth coverage of Web Technology trends and products. We currently have a couple of sponsor slots available for March-April on ReadWriteWeb, so if you would like to enquire about those then please email the editor for a Media Kit. We also have opportunities on … Read more
Today’s winning comment comes from our post Top Health 2.0 Web Apps. At the end of that post we asked for your suggestions of innovative, potentially ground-breaking web apps that will change how healthcare is done. One came from Dr. Anri Kissilenko, who was particularly impressed with the doctor ratings site Vitals. Well done Dr … Read more
Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email. Web Trends Why Google Apps is a Serious Threat to Microsoft Office Bernard Lunn wrote that … Read more
In his post Why Google Apps is a Serious Threat to Microsoft Office, Bernard Lunn argued that the collaboration features in Google Apps are good enough to take on Microsoft. Commenter Karim took him on, with a well-written defense of MS Office. Also check out Bernard’s response and the further debate that ensued. This kind … Read more
Love it or hate it, the social news site digg sure does have a passionate user base. This Monday night (February 25th) at 9pm EST/6pm PST, Digg is holding a virtual “Townhall webcast”, in partnership with Ustream. In a recent blog post Digg founder Kevin Rose said that in the webcast “we’ll be talking about … Read more
Health 2.0, web-based apps and services for the healthcare sector, is a nascent but potentially huge market for web 2.0. As of now, many of these apps have an emphasis on communication, information sharing and community. These are relatively easy things to address using Web tools. However we’re starting to see health 2.0 apps try … Read more
We had a lot of great comments today, but the winner is from our post How Vulnerable is Google on Search?. The premise was that Google hasn’t changed search in 7 or 8 years, so they are vulnerable to search innovators – like the companies profiled at AltSearchEngines. Gabe Morris agreed with the premise, but … Read more
Late last night Marshall Kirkpatrick published an epic post entitled Fail: Social News on World Events, Like Cuba. It is a great analysis of how web 2.0 news services covered a big mainstream news story. And the comments to the post are just as interesting. We actually got some kickback, with many commenters saying that … Read more
Recently the winners of the MobileMonday Peer Awards were announced, coinciding with the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. We covered the 25 nominees here. The award recognizes early stage and emerging Mobile Web start-up companies. Buzzd, a provider of local real-time search information for bars, clubs and restaurants, won the jury, audience and community awards … Read more
Our 9th daily Comments Competition winner is Falafulu Fisi, for his comment on our post Web 2.0 Meets Medicine. Falafulu told us that the “current state of the art in medicine 2.0 of today is the automated online CDSS (Clinical Decision Support Systems)”, which he says is starting to do diagnosis via the Web. Congratulations … Read more
Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks did an analysis of current frontpage stories on digg, the popular social news site that started out as a tech competitor to Slashdot. Allen noted that now just 15% of frontpage stories are technology ones, which is a huge change from its roots. Slashdot meanwhile continues to focus exclusively on … Read more
Bertalan Meskó from the excellent ScienceRoll blog has uploaded a presentation he gave recently at the Medicine Meets Virtual Reality conference. The presentation, embedded below, is a great overview of how the Web is being utilized in the medical profession. I was particularly interested in the story of Dr Jay Parkinson, a Web-savvy doctor. He … Read more