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
We have two prize winners to announce, for yesterday and today. Our 7th and 8th daily Comments Competition winners come from two different posts. The first is one from Reaching for the Sky Through The Compute Clouds. It came from martin english, who wrote that companies still need “backup clouds”, even if they use Amazon’s … Read more
Last.fm is generally acknowledged to be one of the best web apps of this era – its music recommendation system literally creates a personalized radio station for you. But the now CBS-owned service doesn’t get nearly enough credit for its API. We’ve heard stories about how 90% of Twitter’s use comes from its API. Well, … 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. Easily the biggest tech story of the past two weeks has been Microsoft’s unsolicited $44 billion … Read more
Our 6th daily Comments Competition winner comes from a comment on our post 11 Things To Know About Semantic Web. It came from Alan Wilensky, who wrote that “all of the [Semantic Web] tech that has been so promised is great for diddling, but we haven’st seen productivity delivered.” Congratulations Alan, you’ve won a $30 … Read more
Our 5th daily Comments Competition winner comes via a trackback. It’s from Risa Dickens of the blog Indyish, in response to our post R.E.M. Releases New Videos Under Open Source License. Congratulations Risa, you’ve won a $30 Amazon voucher, courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget. Risa wrote that REM’s open … Read more
Our fourth daily Comments Competition winner is Chuck Lawson, for his comment on our post Is the iPhone the Ultimate eBook Reader?. Congratulations Chuck, you’ve won a $30 Amazon voucher, courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget. Chuck noted that the Kindle is better for eBooks, but the iPhone is always … Read more
Tom Coates of Yahoo Brickhouse (ex-BBC) is over in Wellington for Webstock, giving a talk on the Web of Data. I’ve been a fan of Tom’s Web theories for a long time, so it was great to see him speak live. He starts by saying that the companies that have done well on the Web … Read more
We received an interesting email today from Business Wire, a press release wire service that Warren Buffett bought in March 2006. Currently Business Wire is ranked about #32 on the Techmeme Leaderboard, which puts it above some top tech blogs (but not ReadWriteWeb, which is ranked #6 currently). The email claimed that companies and marketers … Read more
Our third daily Comments Competition winner is rick gregory, for his comment on our post Facebook Makes it Easier to Delete Your Account, Sort Of. Congratulations rick, you’ve won a $30 Amazon voucher, courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget. rick claimed that despite all the talk of data portability from … Read more
I’m at the Webstock conference in Wellington, New Zealand. Currently speaking is Peter Morville, whose topic is “Ambient Findability and the Future of Search”. Peter Morville was co-author of the famous ‘polar bear’ book about Information Architecture – which was like a bible to many of us who started our careers as webmasters or designers. … Read more
Our second daily Comments Competition winner is theharmonyguy, for an insightful explanation of Googler Kevin Marks’ “Social Cloud” theory. Congratulations theharmonyguy, you’ve won a $30 Amazon voucher, courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget. theharmony guy argued that both OpenSocial and Facebook are “mainly creating a cloud for developers, not users.” … Read more
One of the speakers at the LIFT conference – where Kevin Marks from Google also presented – was Gen Kanai, Mozilla’s Director of business development in Asia. In his presentation Kanai talked about Mozilla’s market share in Asia, plus the perception that Asia isn’t contributing enough to open source projects. Firstly there were some interesting … Read more
Interesting video presentation from Kevin Marks, Google’s main evangelist for the OpenSocial project. Marks explains more about the theory behind OpenSocial, in what he calls “the social cloud”. This seems to be a variation of the Social Graph concept, which Alex Iskold analyzed for ReadWriteWeb last September. See also Sarah Perez’s post today on a … Read more
Our first daily Comments Competition winner is Dan from BlogMinistry, who left this comment on Josh Catone’s post CNN to Launch Completely User Generated News Site. Congratulations Dan, you’ve won a $30 Amazon voucher, courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their SmartLink Widgets. Here is Dan’s comment, with some great advice for big media … Read more
As many of you know, we recently underwent a re-design at ReadWriteWeb and upgraded our publishing system at the same time. Unfortunately that resulted in some frustrating technical glitches with our comments system. However, we’re now pleased to report that ReadWriteWeb’s comment system is back running 100% — and it’s a heck of a lot … Read more