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
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. Product Reviews This week’s Web Product of the Week is Iceberg, which Phil Butler profiled for Read/WriteWeb. Iceberg is a private beta startup that provides … Read more
Interesting news tidbit today that Billboard is adding online music streaming to its ‘algorithm’ for compiling the Weekly Billboard Top 100. As a Gen X person who grew up listening to the weekly American Top 40 (by Casey Kasem and then Shadoe Stevens), this struck a chord with me. According to the press release, in … Read more
A new online video show about web technology debuted this week, called WebbAlert. It is already making some waves in the blogosphere. Hosted by Morgan Webb, it’s a daily 5-minute show on the latest web tech news. I watched the debut episode yesterday and immediately added the RSS feed to my start page. Then today … Read more
When Yahoo’s next-generation online advertising system was launched on 5 February this year, it was expected to be a panacea for Yahoo’s ailing fortunes. Yahoo’s Panama ad system is designed to take ad quality and other factors into consideration in determining how ads are ranked on search results pages. Panama includes a new search ranking … Read more
In a cheeky move, Netvibes has released a Facebook widget. Both Netvibes and Facebook are leading Web platforms for widgets (i.e. mini web apps that can be plugged into web pages and sites). So Netvibes is neatly trying to entice Facebook users to use Netvibes instead of Facebook as their homepage. Here is an example … Read more
A few reports are circulating that Microsoft will offer a free, ad supported version of Microsoft Works, its ‘lite’ office suite, within the next few months. However the kicker is that it won’t be a browser-based offering – as the rumor was back in September 2006. The free version of Microsoft Works will be a … Read more
Our network blog last100 has an excellent feature story on Amazon’s digital living room product range, including Amazon Unbox (the company’s digital video download service), “information products” like Internet Movie Database (IMDB) and Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com), and how it could all be integrated via ‘cloud services’?. The digital living room market is fiercly competitive … Read more
Read/WriteWeb network blog AltSearchEngines has just published the August Top 100 Alt Search Engine list. Here is the excel spreadsheet; the full list is on ASE. This week AltSearchEngines also published a 3 part series defining a) What is a Search Engine? (an article by Nitin Karandikar), b) What is Not a Search Engine? (by … Read more
This week’s Read/WriteWeb Files is investigating the 100 Days For Yahoo. In a recent earnings conference call, new Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said that “the next 100 days or so” will be spent mapping out Yahoo’s strategic plan. So we thought we’d help with the strategic analysis. Yesterday I listed 10 top Web properties that … Read more
With the attention-grabbing headling Social Networking Goes Global, comScore has released its latest stats on the large social network sites. According to comScore, MySpace is over twice as large as its nearest rival, Facebook. Both Facebook and Bebo have had extraordinary growth over the past year (270% and 172% respectively): These are interesting stats which … Read more
Next generation internet messaging product Tangler has just announced embedding and integration functionality. Tangler is a tool for enabling real-time discussions anywhere on the web. It’s part forum, part IM – a hybrid product that uses web services. Tangler is still in beta – and has been for some time. In fact there’s a Tangler … Read more
Most Web users probably use at least one Yahoo product on a regular basis. So as part of our 100 Days For Yahoo week, let’s take a look at 10 that are among the leaders in their particular market segment, or are particularly innovative. These are subjective selections, because it’s almost impossible to use objective … Read more
Read/WriteWeb network blog AltSearchEngines has launched a fascinating series today. It’s a 3-part series attempting to define what is a search engine. While it’s focused on 2007, the series will also address what a search engine might look like in the future. The first part, entitled What is a Search Engine?, is written by Nitin … Read more
Following the success of Facebook Week, every week on Read/WriteWeb we are going to focus on a particular Web Technology topic and investigate it. We’ll write 4-5 feature posts on each topic, run a poll, and also revisit past R/WW posts on the subject. We’re calling this new feature the Read/WriteWeb Files. This week we’ve … Read more
Lending Club is an online lending community where people can borrow and lend money, bypass the banks, and supposedly get better rates. What’s really interesting about this is that Lending Club operates entirely via Facebook. It is a Facebook community and does not operate as a standalone website (although they have plans to). Read/WriteWeb listed … Read more