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
Alex Iskold wrote a great post on his company’s blog, outlining conference tips for startups. It is written from a vendor or sponsor’s point of view and makes for interesting reading. Alex definitely recommends ETech, SXSW. He gives a firm “maybe” to TechCrunch Party, Web 2.0 Expo, Web 2.0 Summit, Defrag, Blog World, AJAXWorld. His … Read more
A new Forrester report states that Instant Messenging (IM) is by far the most valuable ‘web 2.0’ tool for enterprises: “Web 2.0 tools and technologies are the latest in a long line of technologies that have taken root with consumers who then smuggle them into the business world. IM is one notable example. To this … Read more
Sponsor: 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 It was a relatively quiet week in terms of Web technology news. Perhaps the most exciting thing to happen was an ‘old media’ … Read more
Web Office suite vendor ThinkFree has offered 50 invites to get into the ThinkFree Premium closed beta. The first 50 respondees who send an email to the inbox readwriteweb@thinkfree.com will get a fully-licensed version of ThinkFree Premium to evaluate. I’m not sure at this point how long the evaluation period is, so I’ve sent an … Read more
Tim Bray announced today on his blog that the Atom Publishing Protocol, a way to create and update Web resources, is “done”. He wrote: “Atom is done. Now the editorial processes grind away and eventually the official specification of the Atom Publishing Protocol will be an RFC substantially identical to draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-17; it’ll join RFC4287 as … Read more
I resisted the headline ‘Desktop RSS Readers Are Dead’, but our latest poll of which methods people use to read RSS feeds is showing a clear trend – more people are using browser-based RSS Readers and less are using desktop Readers. This week’s poll is almost identical to a poll we did 6 months ago, … Read more
Today Nokia has acquired the media sharing service Twango. Twango combines online storage with social networking, allowing users to organize and share photos, videos and other personal media. Read/WriteWeb wrote an in-depth profile of Twango back in January, in a post entitled Twango Tackles Lucrative Media Sharing Market. Well it turns out it was a … Read more
Today I spotted a link on YouTube to “Try out the NEW (beta) version of this page!”. Clicking through, I saw a fresh design for their video pages – not a huge re-design, but there were some subtle improvements. The main navigation and theme is largely the same, but links have been re-ordered, usability had … Read more
Last night we broke the news that web hosting company Media Temple is bringing virtualization to Dedicated Physical Servers, with its Nitro product. Today there is further virtualization news, with HP acquiring two companies in this domain: a $1.6 billion acquisition of Opsware (which Netscape founder Marc Andreessen co-founded, under the name LoudCloud) and a … Read more
This week we’ll be exploring RSS products. To complement this focus, our poll is asking: how do you primarily read your feeds? We asked a similar question in January, so we’re looking to see if the trends have changed since then. But this time we’re also asking what is your primary means of reading RSS, … Read more
Media Temple, which hosts Read/WriteWeb, is announcing a brand new product at Hosting Con in Chicago this coming Tuesday evening PST. It’s called the Nitro and Read/WriteWeb is the first to bring you this news. Nitro is a Dedicated Physical Virtual Server (dpv), but it comes with the same virtualization technology that powers their virtual … Read more
Last week the personalized start page Pageflakesannounced its latest version, nicknamed Blizzard. It introduces social networking functionality, themes, a slick Ajax UI, and more. What struck me about the new look was how much it reminded me of Facebook, or at least how much it wants to be like Facebook. The same can be said … Read more
At the beginning of this week we introduced a new comments feature on Read/WriteWeb, called SezWho. Basically it introduces comment rating, reputation and filtering to this blog. SezWho was created by one of our occasional writers, Jitendra Gupta – whose team installed it onto R/WW. You can check out the full list of features in … Read more
Sponsor: 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. Facebook Week This week was Facebook Week on Read/WriteWeb. It was a huge success, even if by the end of the week a few … Read more
Daniel Langendorf has an excellent post on last100, analyzing comments made by Vincent Dureau, Google’s head of TV technology, in his opening keynote at iTV Con – a trade show conference dedicated to Internet TV. It seems that Google is aiming to create versions of search and Adsense for InternetTV, to match what they did … Read more