Writer & Tech Journalist
How emerging tech trends in the 2020s — metaverse aka 3D internet, Machine Learning, AR apps, web platform, and NFTs — are changing the way we perceive the world and ourselves.
I’ve just finished a series of five columns for The New Stack about the serverless trend in cloud computing. It’s a terrible name, but basically serverless means removing all the backend burden for developers. No need to worry about infrastructure or servers, you just pay a platform like AWS Lambda to run everything — you … Read more
For the past few months, I’ve been writing a weekly tech column for The New Stack. The theme of the column is what’s next on the cloud native internet. It’s an update on my long-time blogging theme, what’s next on the web; which was also ReadWriteWeb’s mission statement. The term “cloud native” is how most … Read more
Despite the dominance of Big Tech and the damage that social media has inflicted on the read/write web over the past decade, from a cultural consumption perspective we’ve got it very good at the end of 2019.
Every December going back to 2004, I’ve done an end-of-year review of internet technology trends. This year focuses on what I call “culture-tech”: digital technology that is transforming the cultural industries.
In this third and final part of my audio vs text series, I examine where podcasts fit into the cultural content landscape. The thesis of this series is that audio formats, such as podcasting and audiobooks, have in some ways replaced textual formats like blogs and print books. Text content is certainly not dead, of course, but … Read more
In last week’s feature article, I analyzed the rise of audio formats in comparison to the decline in print formats. Specifically: podcasts and audiobooks are on a bull run in the content market, whereas blogs, print books and ebooks continue their bearish tendencies. In the following two articles in this audio vs text series, I’ll take a deeper dive … Read more
On The Bill Simmons Podcast this month, author Malcolm Gladwell said something that startled me: the audiobook version of his latest book, Talking to Strangers, was outselling the hard cover after the first week on sale. He mentioned this was also happening with the books of Jordan Peterson, a middle-aged self help author who’s become enormously popular with younger generations due to … Read more
Last week I argued that blogs, Tumblr and email newsletters can offer an alternative to the Black Mirror world of social media we currently live in. In particular, that we can build this new world – the blogosphere 2.0 – around cultural content. Once again I have to caution: I don’t see this as competing with social media, because … Read more
The following post is my argument for a new type of social networking built around cultural content. While blogs, Tumblr and email newsletters cannot compete with social media for popular attention, we can build an alternative, more thoughtful, world with these tools.
Online gaming, virtual reality experiences and mixed reality apps are among the fastest growing parts of the digital economy. But are they what we’d traditionally label as “culture”? A new report argues that not only should these “interactive media” be talked about in the same breath as movies, music and books, they’re also essential to … Read more
In this week’s free weekly Cybercultural newsletter, I look at the problem of archiving cultural content from magazines, blogs, musicians and video gamers – and why it matters. Have you ever had any of these issues lately while trying to access content? You wrote a blog in the early to late 2000s, but it’s long … Read more
Every December going back to 2004, I’ve done an end-of-year review of the top Internet technology trends. As a source for this year’s review, I’m using the nearly fifty weekly columns I’ve written over the course of 2018. They’re a good indicator of what I’ve focused on during the year, and what has defined this year in terms … Read more
Every December I write a blog post looking back at the leading technology trends of the year. I first started doing this in 2004, when Read/Write Web was my personal blog. That was also the year “Web 2.0” was named, denoting the trend of using the Web as a platform. There’s a connection, at least … Read more
Yesterday I wrote a post about blogrolls. I published it on AltPlatform, the new tech blog I recently started with my old ReadWriteWeb friend Emre Sokullu. It was the second post in a series I’m doing about IndieWebifying my personal website. I got some great responses, which I’m going to discuss in this post. Firstly, … Read more