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
This week’s poll is a tough one, because we’re asking you to predict the future. But we hope you’re game enough to vote, because it’ll give us some clues on what to write about in Web Future Week 😉 We’re asking: Which Web technology do you think will have the most impact over the next … Read more
The NY Times reports that Microsoft will release a Unified Installer program for Windows Live this week, enabling PC users to download a set of the services – understood to be Windows Live Writer, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger 8.5 and Windows Live OneCare Family Safety. John Markoff of the … Read more
This week’s feature is inspired by Alex Iskold’s recent post on what he called The Digestion Phase. Alex defined this as “a period of time for us to reflect, to integrate, and to understand recent technologies and how they fit together.” We’ve come so far in just a few years and while there’s a lot … Read more
Ever wished you were a guest star on The Simpsons? Well now you can at least create a likeness of yourself, should The Simpsons producers ever call. On Simpsonize Me, you can upload a photo of yourself and then make adjustments until the cartoon drawing resembles you. Here’s mine – add a link to yours … Read more
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. This week Read/WriteWeb introduced a new network blog: a podcasting show called Read/WriteTalk, hosted by Sean Ammirati. The tagline behind the show is “The People … Read more
Earlier this week Bloglines launched a beta re-design, ending about two years of design stagnation for the once dominant browser-based RSS Reader. During my conversation with new Bloglines GM Eric Engleman, we touched on the impact of Google Reader on this market. Has Google Reader in fact usurped Bloglines as the number 1 browser-based RSS … Read more
Jooce is a new Flash-based WebOS product from France, currently in private beta (we have invites at the bottom of this post). The primary use case for Jooce is for people who use cyber-cafes a lot, instead of or in addition to their own PCs or laptops. Jooce enables users to store, share and access … Read more
CNET columnist Matt Asay asks, provocatively: “does Google own your content?”. It’s based on a post by ZDNet’s Joshua Greenbaum, who picked up on some interesting language in the terms and conditions of Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Here’s the offending passage: “Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by … Read more
Our poll this week asks: Which tool do you mostly use for word processing?. We’ve had a great response, with 837 unique votes so far. The results are very much in favor of desktop word processing tools, which is a little surprising considering the early adopter readership of Read/WriteWeb. Microsoft Word has 47% of the … Read more
Daniel Langendorf at last100 has written an outstanding post, explaining how (if done right) the Gphone and not the iPhone will be the one to change the face of the wireless industry. The post has accompanying graphics – Gphone concepts contributed by Lorin Wood, a previsualization designer who specializes in concepts and ideation for Hollywood. … Read more
This is Web Office Week here at Read/WriteWeb, but some of you may not be 100% sure what a Web Office is. Even the Wikipedia definition is a bit bare bones, so in this post I’m going to take a crack at defining ‘Web Office’. What I ended up with is this: A Web Office … Read more
Slide, which makes slideshow and media widgets for the major social network platforms (including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Xanga, Tagged and Blogger) has announced that more than a million new flash widgets are being added to its network every day. Its most popular widgets are Slideshows, SkinFlix, Guestbooks and FunPix. Slide is very popular on … Read more
I never thought one of our network sites would be outed by Valleywag, but that’s what happened today 🙂 I’m pleased to introduce Read/WriteTalk, a brand new podcasting show produced by Sean Ammirati and myself. Sean is the driving force behind the show, so all credit goes to him for setting it up and doing … Read more
One of the leading RSS Aggregation startups, NewsGator Technologies, jumped on the Facebook bandwagon today with NewsFriends (add to Facebook here) – a social news application where Facebook users can aggregate and share news, videos and podcasts. Once you have it installed, you can select friends and it automatically delivers you the news they are … Read more
This poll is about the Web Office, our feature this week. We’re looking to find out your current word processing habits – have they changed much now that online word processing is an option? Not wanting to sway the poll results, but currently I use browser-based word processors much more than desktop ones. I find … Read more