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 night we covered the announcement of Twine, which aims to be the first mainstream Semantic Web application. Twine founder Nova Spivack showed me a demo of the new app, which he described as a “knowledge networking” application. One of the things I asked Nova right at the end of the interview was his definition … Read more
For those of you who couldn’t pay $4000 to get into Web 2.0 Summit – or didn’t want to – the organizers have started to release videos of the main sessions on blip.tv. Below is the Mark Zuckerberg session (the Mary Meeker one is also online). Some quick thoughts on Web 2.0 Summit this year … Read more
On Friday Radar Networks is announcing a new Semantic Web application called Twine. Founder Nova Spivack showed me a demo today of the new app, which he described as a “knowledge networking” application. It has aspects of social networking, wikis, blogging, knowledge management systems – but its defining feature is that it’s built with Semantic … Read more
One of my favorite parts of the Web 2.0 conferences run by O’Reilly/CMP is the 15 minute quickfire presentation done every year by Mary Meeker. There is always a wealth of fascinating data about Web trends and products, which Meeker hits you with at a mllion miles an hour. Luckily in this case her presentation … Read more
This evening News Corp chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, and MySpace CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe, were the featured speakers at the Web 2.0 Summit. It is the two year anniversary of the News Corp acquisition of MySpace, so there was some discussion on the growth of MySpace and how it is evolving. The pair … Read more
I’m here at the Web 2.0 Summit 2007 in San Francisco, the third year I’ve been to the conference. Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle started out with an overview of web 2.0 now; and one thing they noted is that social networking has moved from an ‘edge’ technology to a center technology. John Battelle then … Read more
Today Microsoft is announcing two strategic partnerships, with enterprise software company Atlassian and RSS solutions vendor NewsGator. The partnerships link togther Microsoft’s SharePoint product with Atlassian’s wiki collaboration product Confluence and a new offering from Newsgator called ‘NewsGator Social Sites’, a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware for SharePoint. Microsoft Office SharePoint … Read more
Last week Read/WriteWeb editor Richard MacManus interviewed Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra co-founder and CEO. The result is a 30 minute podcast available on Read/WriteTalk (transcript included). The following post is highlights from the discussion, which focused on Zimbra’s journey from October 2005 Web 2.0 Conference launch to September 2007 acquisition by Yahoo! for $350M. In September … Read more
It’s been a very busy Monday on Read/WriteWeb – so here’s a recap of the day’s posts, plus Network highlights: Top News – Attention – NewsGator and Bloglines Join APML Workgroup (Marshall) – Discovery Purchasing HowStuffWorks for $250 Million (Josh) – AdBrite: Full Page “Skip This Ad” Units Now Available for Everyone (Marshall) – On … Read more
As noted last week, a group of startups promoting themselves at Mobile 2.0. Part 1 was in the morning. Here now is the afternoon session (note it was just 5 minutes per speaker, so we only got brief overviews of each service). Webwag Mobile We’ve written before about Webwag, a personalized start page. Webwag Mobile … Read more
Taptu is a new kind of search engine for mobile phones, being launched today at the Mobile 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. Taptu uses a new technique which they call “Social Assisted Search” (SAS) – it combines algorithms with human feedback (from which it derives “social relevancy scores”) to deliver the results. Taptu’s aim is … Read more
As noted last week, a group of startups are launching today at Mobile 2.0. Here are the first lot: heysan heysan describes itself as a “mobile meebo” – it’s a meta IM service for mobile phones. It is mobile browser based and works on the iPhone. The service is free and features include one single … Read more
I’m at the second annual Mobile 2.0 event in San Francisco. Rudy de Waele of mTrends starts with an overview of Mobile 2.0: an all-IP environment and application mashups are two features. Rudy has been a guest author on Read/WriteWeb before and his Understanding Mobile 2.0 post from December is one of the best introductions … Read more
Sponsor: Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email. Web News Newsvine Acquired By MSNBC The week started with some big M&A news in the Citizen Journalism space – Newsvine was acquired by … Read more
Our poll this week asks what you’d be prepared to pay for the download version of Radiohead’s new album In Rainbows. In the comments to the original post, someone pointed to a Gizmodo report stating that Radiohead will sell In Rainbows via CD early next year, through one of the ‘big four’ record companies. The … Read more