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 Read/WriteWeb will be featuring a series of posts about the Web Office. Let’s start by summarizing what exactly is a Web Office. In a June post we mentioned that a Web Office suite should have, at the least, the following apps in it: email, calendar, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations. These are the core … Read more
Tonight Bloglines is launching a new design at beta.bloglines.com, which includes a new personalizable Start Page, more views, and drag and drop Ajax functionality. I spoke to new Bloglines GM Eric Engleman about the makeover and tested the Beta Bloglines myself. My judgement below, plus I re-cap the history of Bloglines and how they dropped … Read more
The Ajax version of Yahoo Mail has finally had its beta tag removed and is now the default interface for all Yahoo Mail accounts. The new service includes two interesting real-time communication features: 1) Free text messaging to mobile phone numbers (but only available in the US, Canada, India and the Philippines); 2) Integrated instant … Read more
Recently Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, has been throwing out warning signals about the Internet. He told the BBC that poor security and poor software design are undermining the reliability of the internet. In particular he mentioned Operating Systems and browsers: “The biggest hole we have is with internet browsers, … Read more
Mark Cuban says the Internet is dead and boring, but Fred Wilson says it isn’t for him! Who’s right? Well, both of them. Let me quickly explain (before you get bored with what is actually a fairly pointless argument). Cuban wrote: “Some people have tried to make the point that Web 2.0 is proof that … Read more
The Attention Economy is a marketplace where consumers agree to receive services in exchange for their attention. Examples include personalized news, personalized search, alerts and recommendations to buy. Note that the Attention Economy is different from the tradional meaning of an economy, because it isn’t about buying and selling – although ultimately those things may … Read more
This week we’re trying something new with the format of the Weekly Wrapup. Instead of listing all of the posts we published over the past week, we’ll filter them so you just get the best posts. The idea is that this will make good weekend reading, because it’ll be highlighting the best content of the … Read more
As a follow-up from our post earlier today – The Web 2.0 Election: Does the Internet Matter in Election Politics? – The Washington Post is reporting that online “friends” could be pivotal in the 2008 U.S. race. But it seems Democrats have a big advantage on popular social networks: “Democrats outnumber Republicans 5-to-1 on Facebook … Read more
Mefeedia was one of the online video aggregators that Josh Catone reviewed in his Guide to Video Aggregation Sites. It claims to aggregates video blogs and web shows from over 15,000 websites. Their index include 3.3 million episodes from over 24,000 different video feeds. In a recent blog post, the Mefeedia team noted that YouTube … Read more
This week is Online Video Week at R/WW, so our network blog AltSearchEngines went out and found the leading video search engines on the Web. Following is the list that ASE editor Charles Knight came up with – he used Google Video as the benchmark. What is your favorite video search engine? Let us know … Read more
Today the NY Times announced its new personalized start page, called My Times. As with existing ‘start pages’, such as My Yahoo, Pageflakes and Netvibes, My Times is a way to create a personal homepage for news and mini web apps – by adding RSS feeds and other widgets. With My Times you can also … Read more
Alex Iskold’s latest post coins a new term: The Digestion Phase. Alex says that the latest wave of technology, which started in early 2003, has peaked: “We have entered a digestion phase. It is not a burst, nor a recession. Rather, a digestion phase is a period of time for us to reflect, to integrate, … Read more
This is Online Video Week at Read/WriteWeb and the folks at Yahoo pinged us about a new inline video player on Yahoo.com. It’s just been rolled out along with a new ‘video’ module, allowing people to watch videos without leaving the page. Users can also see related videos, and email or IM interesting videos to … Read more
Earlier this week a Sydney Morning Herald article claimed that Facebook “may be costing Australian businesses $5 billion a year.” The quote is from an analytics firm called SurfControl, in a report which calculated “that if an employee spends an hour each day on Facebook, it costs the company more than $6200 a year. There … Read more
Conduit Labs, a stealth startup that is building a mix between social networks and “immersive online gaming”, today announced a $5.5 million Series A investment from Charles River Ventures (CRV) and Prism VentureWorks. Unfortunately we weren’t able to get any screenshots of the product, but the promise of a totally new form of social network … Read more