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
Tafiti is a new experimental search site from Microsoft. It has rich visualizations and aims to meet the needs of people doing research on the Web. Tafiti runs on the Silverlight browser plug-in platform (Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s Flash) and requires you to install Silverlight if you haven’t already. The underlying search engine is Microsoft’s … Read more
YouTube has come to define the new era of online video, so let’s take a look at their most popular videos of all time. I was expecting something like lonelygirl15 or the original menthos coke video to be number 1. But no, the most popular video of all time on YouTube, so far, has been … Read more
There are two seemingly divergent themes in the Web Office world currently: 1) office software is increasingly heading online, in the form of products like Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Zoho and ThinkFree; 2) web apps are increasingly adding offline functionality. The reason for the ‘bob each way’ is that broadband service is not yet ubiquitous … Read more
Social networking startup CollectiveX has just launched a new product called Groupsites. TechCrunch has the details of Groupsites, noting that it’s a combination of discussion forums, email lists, calendars and social networks. Groupsites are free to use and there are privacy options. Current use cases include membership groups and clubs, social networks, and company Intranets … Read more
Adobe today announced the latest version of its near ubiquitous Web video software, Adobe Flash Player 9. It’s codenamed Moviestar, because it includes H.264 standard video support’ the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD high definition video players. In other words, the quality of video has been substantially improved from the previous version of … Read more
Since launching a few weeks ago, the people search engine Spock is experiencing very heavy traffic – according to the company and also external measures like Alexa. Spock is currently rated number 1 on the Movers and Shakers page on Alexa. Other Alexa stats indicate that the site is experiencing good growth in France, Germany, … Read more
Google China has released a Q&A; site, in partnership with Tianya Club. The Make Meaning blog notes that Tianya Club was founded in 1999 and is one of the most popular discussion forums in China. Tianya has almost 20 million registered users, 80% of whom are 18-35 years old. As we wrote in July, social … Read more
A July Pew report indicated that 57% of U.S. internet users have watched videos online and most of them share what they find with others. The 18-29 age group, at 76%, watches the most online video. Our network blog last100 further reported that 19% of adults watch online video on a typical day. News is … Read more
In October 2006 Google acquired the hottest online video property on the planet, YouTube. Later on that same month, news came out that the founders of Kazaa and Skype were building an Internet TV service, nicknamed The Venice Project (later named Joost). To underscore the point that online was Where It’s At, in December Read/WriteWeb … 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. News The latter part of this week was dominated by the major outage suffered by popular VoIP product Skype. Also this week eBay stepped up … Read more
This week is Online Music Week at Read/WriteWeb, so I decided to check out how the leading music streaming services compared. I used this week’s poll to determine the top 5 apps. As of writing, the top 5 are quite a bit ahead of the the rest of the services in our poll. They are: … Read more
fav.or.it is a new type of RSS Reader currently in private beta, which aims to solve the long-standing issue of feed content being separated from commenting. The fav.or.it RSS Reader lets you read feed content and comment, all within the app. The comments can be two-way, meaning publishers can choose to aggregate fav.or.it comments into … Read more
Our poll this week asks: What is your favorite online music streaming service? So far, last.fm and Pandora have been engaged in an epic struggle – both have led the poll at various times during the week. As of now, last.fm has gone back into the lead. Here’s the top 5 so far: last.fm 32% … Read more
M:Metrics has released some interesting data about mobile social networking. It states that MySpace has the largest mobile network in the United States and UK, while MSN/Windows Live Spaces is preferred in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Overall 12.3 million consumers in the United States and Western Europe reported accessing a social networking site with … Read more
We just received a tipoff that Bolt.com, the online video site that settled a lawsuit with Universal in March, has ceased operations and closed its website. More on this as it develops, but for now this is the message on Bolt’s website: “Please be advised that the operations of Bolt, Inc. and Bolt.com have ceased. … Read more