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
Today ‘human-powered’ search engine Mahalo is launching a new Firefox toolbar, which has some unique functionality that could potentially convert users from Google Search, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com and other major search engines. The new toolbar, once installed into Firefox (IE version is due in September), displays a sidebar every time you do a search on … Read more
Today Microsoft announcedWindows Live SkyDrive, the final product name for its online storage solution – previously known as Windows Live Folders. Windows Live SkyDrive has a few new features and enhanced UI, in line with upcoming changes across other Windows Live services. Windows Live SkyDrive offers users 500MB of web space for storing and sharing … Read more
As part of our Personalizing Google Week, we conducted an email interview with Google’s Sep Kamvar, who is Lead Software Engineer for Personalization at Google. Sep was the founder of Kaltix, a search engine that was acquired by Google in 2003 and is thought to be the basis of Google’s current personalization efforts. Here is … Read more
What’s this? IBM going media 2.0? Big Blue has released a Noir-themed report entitled ‘Navigating the Media Divide: Innovating and Enabling New Business Models.’ It comes with a movie inspired design and pitch: “Traditional and new media are clashing. The old rules on content and distribution: gone. Traditional alliances: unreliable. Long-established partnerships: threatened. Everything’s changing. … Read more
Since French startup Zlio opened in the US in February, it has been busy making alliances with US companies (and annoying Amazon.com too). Zlio is a service that enables any Internet user to start a virtual store and populate it with products from a number of merchants. Zlio automatically figures out which of their merchant … Read more
The rumor tonight is that social shopping service Kaboodle has been acquired for $30M+ by Hearst. We profiled Kaboodle and other social shopping services back in December in our Social Shopping Faceoff. Our conclusion then was that Kaboodle leads the social shopping pack, with a clean UI and the most comprehensive feature set. It also … Read more
Web office vendor Dabble DB has jumped on the Facebook bandwagon and launched a “social to-do list” called Dabble Do. You can get it on Facebook here. How is it social, I hear you ask? Basically you can assign items not only to yourself, but to your friends – and be kept up-to-date on their … Read more
In Greg Linden’s guest post defining Web personalization, he notes that Google Personalized Search uses technology acquired in 2003 from a small startup named Kaltix. He goes on to say that “the current version of Google Personalized Search learns from your search queries. Searchers do not have to do anything explicitly to use it; it … Read more
Google CEO Eric Schmidt was recently at the Seoul Digital Forum and he was asked to define Web 3.0 by an audience member. After first joking that Web 2.0 is “a marketing term”, Schmidt launched into a great definition of Web 3.0. He said that while Web 2.0 was based on Ajax, Web 3.0 will … Read more
Recently a Forrester report was released stating that the iPhone “signals the beginning of the end for the mobile Web as we know it today”. The report suggested that re-designing sites for the small screens of mobile phones would become “a thing of the past”, because of the iPhone’s advanced technology such as zooming. Some … Read more
It’s fascinating watching different Web platforms utilizing each other, for various reasons. First it was Netvibes with its Facebook widget, which was mostly a cheeky move to get Facebook users to switch to Netvibes for their homepage. Now Firefox has gotten into the act with an Add-ons sharing app called Rock Your Firefox. In this … Read more
Based on log file evidence from a friend who runs a personal website, Rich Skrenta claims that only 11 search startups are actually crawling the web. He wonders where all the alt search engines are? For some reason, Rich doesn’t link to Charles Knight’s Top 100 Alt Search Engine List in asking that question, but … Read more
This week’s poll is part of our R/WW Files on Personalizing Google. We’re asking if you’ve noticed much difference in your Google search results, now that Google claims you can “get more relevant search results” when signed into Google Accounts. Let us know what you think. Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)
This week we’re opening a file on Google’s efforts towards personalization, a trend that has become very apparent in Google over the past year. As we did with Yahoo last week, we’ll publish a number of feature articles looking at how Google is implementing personalization into its products – and how it effects you, the … Read more
A huge thank you to our sponsors, for supporting Read/WriteWeb and our growing community and network of blogs. One of our sponsors even made it onto the Conan O’Brien show (see below)! Our sponsors are… Wine library Tv is one of my favorite video blogs and check out the YouTube clip below to see why. … Read more