2004

Back in the early 90’s I used to read William S. Burroughs books and for a while I was quite taken with his “cut-up” method of writing. The cut-up technique is a specialised literary form in which a text is cut up at random and rearranged to create a new text (ref: Wikipedia). I think … Read more

There’s a nice meme just started, asking people to list their Top 24 posts of 2004 (via). I decided to check out my web stats and dig out the most-visited posts of 2004 for Read/Write Web. They may not necessarily be “the best” posts in terms of quality, but the people have spoken and the … Read more

DISCLOSURE: This post is part of my sponsorship arrangement with Marqui. I am being paid US$800 per month by Marqui from 1 December 2004 – 28 February 2005, to post once a week about Marqui. OK, there’s been a lot of discussion about the merits or otherwise of the Marqui project – much of it … Read more

I came across PubSub’s LinkRank feature for the first time today. It’s an interesting new measurement… Here is the official blurb, comparing it to Google PageRank: “Unlike Google’s PageRank system, LinkRanks are not iterative. Rather, we base LinkRanks on a simple formula that only looks at local links – links which are within one or … Read more

What if I told you that, starting 1 December, I will be paid US$800 per month for 3 months to write 1 blog post per week about a company called Marqui. Would you think I was “tainting” the blogosphere? Would you accuse me of being a sellout? Would you doubt my integrity? Hmm, well that’s … Read more

Listened to the latest Gillmor Gang Show, with Jonathan Schwartz as guest. Sun’s Schwartz is one very smart cookie and a very effective speaker. The following quote in particular stood out for me: “We [Sun] want a world where there are tons and tons of interesting, interactive iPod equivalents – where people are doing interesting … Read more

A couple of weeks ago I was bitching that none of my favourite authors had their most recent books available in eBook format. Well as luck would have it, Tom Wolfe just released his new novel I am Charlotte Simmons and it is available as an eBook! I went to 3 sources to check out … Read more

This is a copy of a suggestion I’ve just sent to Bloglines Support. It was inspired by a Feedburner Forums thread I started a few days ago, regarding whether Feedburner was counting all of my RSS feeds in their statistics. Turned out they weren’t and there was indeed an issue “with online aggregators when you … Read more

Well here I am blogging in my pyjamas. Not literally, but metaphorically. Chillin’. Taking stock. Thinking about goals for next year. I’ve also been thinking about my Design for Data theory and while I’ve been doing that, a few posts elsewhere have attracted my attention… First a “in a nutshell” re-cap of what Design for … Read more

To wrap up what has been a busy week, yesterday I finally got some momentum going in the blogosphere with the O’Reilly interview. Thanks to Jason Kottke, Robert Scoble, Phil Pearson (btw welcome back Phil!), Lucas Gonze and all the others who kindly linked to it. What happened was, I published Part 1 of the … Read more

In this final instalment of my interview with Tim O’Reilly (see also: Part 1 & Part 2), we discuss eBooks, social networking, collaboration and Remix culture. This is probably my favourite segment of the interview, because we explored some interesting new ideas here about Web publishing. Books and Social Networking Richard: eBooks are a current … Read more

I recently did a dump of content from my PDA to my linkblog – things I’d been reading offline and not yet recorded in my ‘Ideas Database’ (aka my linkblog). One batch of links is from a single person, Bill Ives. So I thought I’d dump them into one R/WW post – more for my … Read more

This is the second in a 3-part interview with O’Reilly Media CEO, Tim O’Reilly. In part 2, we discuss business models for Web 2.0 and the future of RSS. Business Models for Web Content Richard: There’s been a bit of discussion amongst bloggers recently about monetizing weblogs – making money off one’s Web content. This … Read more

In a recent post I floated the theory that Content Creators need Media Companies to help them attract mass eyeballs to read their carefully-crafted content. It would be a symbiotic relationship – the Media Co’s get compelling content and the Content Creator gets mass readership. It’s win-win and I think this is one way round … Read more

Welcome to the second in my series of Web 2.0 interviews, in which I interview people in the Web community who are building or shaping Web 2.0 – i.e. the Web as Platform. And who better to talk to than the person who organized the hugely successful Web 2.0 conference held in San Francisco in … Read more