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
A new Forrester report analyzes how the big IT vendors are utilizing Web 2.0 products in the enterprise. As with most Forrester reports, it overlooks the many innovative startups in the ‘Web Office’ space – focusing instead of the big fish such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle. However there is a new report coming soon that … Read more
Being a big Radiohead fan, I was quick to go and buy their new album ‘In Rainbows’ via their website. As has been reported, there is no set price for the album – you input your own price, or get it for free. I mulled it over in my head what I should pay and … Read more
Next week I’ll be in San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Summit. I’m also attending the Mobile 2.0 Conference on Monday 15 October, and will pop my head into the Widget Summit event being held by Niall Kennedy on the same day. Today Read/WriteWeb is the first to announce the Mobile Launch Pad demo companies … Read more
Our digital lifestyle Network blog last100 has been tracking the upheavals in the music industry over the past couple of weeks. First Radiohead released their new album entirely via their website (I got it and it’s awesome!), then Nine Inch Nails (a band which has experimented with the Internet a lot before) announced it has … Read more
We’ve heard from a couple of reliable sources that social network Bebo is about to announce a developer platform very soon. Apparently it will be a “platform API”. The source of these rumors is a Bebo investor, so we think it’s on the mark. Bebo is one of the largest social networks in the world … Read more
MoFuse is a new service that many publishers today have a need for. MoFuse stands for “Mobile Fusion” and it enables you to create a mobile version of your website. It’s similar to Winksite, a mobile conversion and community service that counts BoingBoing among its customers. However MoFuse is simpler, in that it doesn’t offer … Read more
Tim O’Reilly and team have done some interesting research into the rise of Facebook as an application platform. They released a report entitled The Facebook Application Platform, which we’ve been looking at in the virtual offices of Read/WriteWeb. One of the findings in the report is that Facebook apps follow the now familiar power law … Read more
Today Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson contacted Read/WriteWeb to announce that his citizen journalism startup Newsvine has been acquired by MSNBC, the Microsoft/NBC joint venture, for an undisclosed sum. Davidson told us that “Newsvine will continue operating independently, just as it has been since launching in March of 2006.” He also indicated there would be little … 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 Adobe Acquires Virtual Ubiquity – Enters Web Office Fray Josh Catone was at the Adobe MAX 2007 conference in Chicago this week, … Read more
Read/WriteTalk has an interesting podcast interview with Dan Saffer, Experience Design Director at Adaptive Path. In the podcast, R/WT host Sean Ammirati and Dan discussed the process of designing for new types of Web-enabled devices – such as Nintendo’s Wii, Apple’s iPhone and the new touch iPod. The background is that Saffer wrote a blog … Read more
Web Office suite vendor Zoho is continuing its rapid pace of new product releases, with an online database and reports app called Zoho DB. Zoho is making a habit of one-upping their competition, because as of now none of Google, Microsoft Office Live, or ThinkFree offer a comparable online database product. The closest competitor to … Read more
last100 editor Steve O’Hear has been pondering the future of Internet TV and he sees set-top boxes as key. A set-top box, according to this definition, is “a device used with televisions, allowing users access to enhanced and sometimes proprietary features such as digital channels, video-on-demand, and Internet access”. Here is what last100 had to … Read more
AltSearchEngines has just released its latest Top 100 Alternative Search Engines list. ASE tracks over 1,000 “alts” in all, so choosing the top 10% is a pretty big deal. One trend that ASE editor Charles Knight is beginning to see is that some of the alts are getting larger. Charles noted: “We have always said … Read more
Barnes & Noble.com has launched a re-design, with several new web 2.0 features – including “One on One” podcasts, a large tag cloud on the frontpage, a “See Inside” program that offers a virtual book-reading like experience, and a service called “Live at Barnes & Noble” where you can view webcasts of readings at member … Read more
There’s been a lot of discussion over the past 24 hours on the new Techmeme Leaderboard, which is a list of the top 100 sources for the popular tech news aggregator – calculated over the past 30 days. The Leaderboard updates daily and each site is ranked with a “presence” indicator, defined as “the percentage … Read more