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
last100 has an interesting post on Microsoft Points, a kind of virtual currency for the Xbox Live Marketplace and the Zune Marketplace. In a lot of ways, Microsoft Points act just like real money and functions in a similar way to Paypal. Mack D. Male wrote that “if you see a movie you want to … Read more
Web Office suite provider ThinkFree has announced it has hit the 1 Million mark in number of hosted documents, up from 654,000 in late February when we last reported ThinkFree’s usage. Their community uploads between 60,000 to 80,000 documents per month and currently ThinkFree has 335,000 users, up from the 250,000 in February. ThinkFree also … Read more
Six Apart has today announced the commercial release of Movable Type 4, just over two months since it was launched as a beta. MT4 is now the main product on the Movable Type homepage, replacing 3.x. Billed as “the largest release in the product’s history”, MT4 has new community management features and a completely re-designed … Read more
The Filter, a social music recommendation service backed by rock star Peter Gabriel, has released a new version of their software – featuring an improved user interface, a Facebook app and a partnership with Nokia. The Filter is a “playlist creation suite” for iTunes, iPod, iPhone and Apple TV. It works across Windows and Macintosh … Read more
A new study released today by the National School Boards Association shows that 96 percent of students with online access use social networking technologies – defined as as chatting, text messaging, blogging, and visiting online communities such as Facebook, MySpace, and Webkinz. 81 percent say they have visited a social networking Web site within the … Read more
This week’s Read/WriteWeb Files is about Online Music. And the whole R/WW family is contributing. Both AltSearchEngines and last100 have written posts on this theme. AltSearchEngines has listed their Top 10 Music Search Engines. There were a few I’d never heard of before, so go check it out if you’re a music fan. AltSearchEngines editor … Read more
div for entry content including hero We’ve started a new links blog here at Read/WriteWeb, called Web Tech News. As the name suggests, this mini-blog will cover Web Technology news on a daily basis. We’re focusing specifically on Web news, because that is our niche here at R/WW. We think this will be a handy … Read more
div for entry content including hero Today Microsoft announced a number of upgrades to its Windows Live Hotmail service, the web email product previously known as just Hotmail. Included in the upgrades is more storage – free users will get 5 GB and paid users will get 10 GB of Hotmail storage. The free 5GB … Read more
Just a quick update to this week’s poll, which is already rocking. The question is: What is your favorite online music streaming service? Right now last.fm and Pandora are nearly neck and neck in the vote, followed by Yahoo Music. But a couple of updates to the poll: 1) We added FineTune and Live365, as … Read more
This week’s poll complements our special series on Online Music. We’re asking what is your number 1 favorite music streaming service on the Web. With this poll there are bound to be sites that aren’t on the list, but which are somebody’s favorite. We’ve included as many of the major services as we could remember, … Read more
Every week we have a feature called Read/WriteWeb Files, in which we investigate a current hot topic or company in Web technology. This week we’re going to focus on Online Music, something that is becoming more and more prevelant as broadband speed increases and social software functionality gets better. Our network blog on digital lifestyle, … Read more
A New Zealand-based social network, iYomu, is launching globally today with a US$1 Million challenge. iYomu is branding itself as a “social networking website for grown-ups” and the site is restricted to those over 18 years old. The name of the site, iYomu, stands for “I, You, Me and Us”. Its aim is to provide … Read more
The Google Operating System blog noted that Sun’s StarOffice suite of productivity tools has been added to the free Google Pack offering. StarOffice is a direct competitor to Microsoft Office, as it is a full suite of desktop-based office apps that normally retails for $70. It includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing and database. It … 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. Also our sister site last100 has a Weekly Wrapup too. R/WW Files: Personalizing Google This week’s feature series was on Google’s efforts to implement personalization … Read more
Online classifieds startup edgeio has just launched a new paid content product, which will be of particular interest to online publishers and media producers. They’re calling it “transactional classifieds”, which is an awkward name for a potentially very useful e-commerce service. Other terms being bandied around to promote this are “distributed commerce” (better) and “peer … Read more