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
Dan Farber talked to LinkedIn founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman on Friday at the Supernova 2007 conference, and was told that over the next 9 months LinkedIn will deliver APIs for developers. It seems that LinkedIn has been hurried onto this open track due to the hype surrounding Facebook’s new open platform. Dan also reports … Read more
I’m bemused by the latest blogging ‘controversy’ to dominate Techmeme. Normally I don’t blog about these things, but this one has me as a central character – although I wasn’t mentioned in the Valleywag piece that started it all. The Silicon Valley gossip blog has a headline reading ‘Microsoft pays star writers to recite slogan’, … 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: Featured Posts This week we took an in-depth look at the state of the Web Office Suite market, concluding that Google Apps and Zoho were … Read more
One of the strongest, but least hyped, uses of web 2.0 technologies over the past couple of years has been e-learning. We’ve covered this topic extensively on Read/WriteWeb – and so we’re pleased to bring you this overview of e-learning 2.0, including the leading web apps and sites in this niche, and predictions for its … Read more
Read/WriteWeb is looking for writers to do startup and web product reviews. Currently we are being inundated with emails from startups wanting us to profile them, but it’s no longer something I can keep up with due to my R/WW Network duties (this is my way of saying sorry if I haven’t responded to your … Read more
According to recent Compete data, digg has overtaken Facebook in number of unique visitors and has grown 1400% in one year. Compete’s May 2007 data states that digg had 22.6 Million unique visitors, while Facebook had 20.2 Million. Facebook still has many more page views, 11 Billion to digg’s 250 Million – which says that … Read more
One of the new features on AltSearchEngines, the R/WW Network blog edited by Charles Knight, is The Great Debates. Every Tuesday night at 8pm EST / 5pm PST, ASE hosts a discussion between various alternative search engines. Their first debate was on Continuous Search and featured Swamii, Searchbots, and Allth.at. The second debate was on … Read more
Plenty happening in the digital lifestyle space this week. R/WW Network blog last100 reports on the following 3 stories: BitTorrent releases SDK for set-top-boxes and other devices: BitTorrent, the company behind the popular peer-to-peer file sharing technology, has announced the availability of its Software Development Kit (SDK) for consumer electronics devices. Perhaps the most enticing … Read more
Less than 12 hours after we posted our review of the Web Office Suite space, Google has seemingly put the last piece of the jigsaw in place for their suite. Today Google announced it has acquired the assets of Zenter, “a company that provides software for creating online slide presentations.” This technology will be added … Read more
This morning Zoho will release their latest Web Office app, Meeting, as a public beta. It’s a good opportunity to consider what progress each of the main Web Office vendors is making towards a full Web Office Suite. For this post, we’ll consider Google Apps, Microsoft Office Live, Zoho, ThinkFree, and Zimbra. There are others … Read more
Spain/US-based MyStrands announced today that it’s raised $25 Million “to lead the social recommendation industry”. MyStrands is a music discovery and social networking site that covers the PC, mobile and physical worlds. We wrote about MyStrands’ technology in January, at which point it had announced a re-vamp. MyStrands is based on “behavior-based recommendation technologies” and … Read more
Firefox is a browser that can be extended and enhanced in many ways – chief among those being Add-ons, which give you more functionality or perhaps just a new theme. In fact sometimes they give you a full-blown web app, like Yoono, BlogRovr or Trailfire. We’ve written about Firefox add-ons a number of times on … Read more
Fred Wilson has a slightly provocative post this weekend addressing The Age Question, suggesting that it is “harder for anyone older than 30 to get funded in the web services market”. Dave Winer and others vigorously disagree. But I didn’t take offense at Fred’s central premise, even though I’m 35 (the same age as Marc … 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: Featured Stories This week was dominated, at least on the Read/WriteWeb Network, by the Day Without Google – and its results. The idea was to … Read more
Ever since Facebook announced its open platform at the end of May, I have been receiving a flurry of emails from friends and blog buddies wanting to connect on Facebook. It could be just the ‘in thing’ with early adopter blogger types, but maybe it’s more than that. It could be the tipping point for … Read more