2006

The trouble with business trips is they play havoc with my blogging rhythms, so I’ve not been able to post much ‘professional’ content while I’ve been in the valley. But if you’ll bear with me, I’ve got some great stuff coming up. Including a re-design of Read/WriteWeb which I hope to go-live with soon. In … Read more

The latest comScore stats for May 2006 show how fast social networking sites are growing, but YouTube in particular is displaying spectacular growth. As comScore noted in its monthly report: “There seems to be no end in sight when it comes to the popularity of social networking sites. Myspace.com surpassed the 50 million unique visitor-mark … Read more

At the Supernova conference last week I had the pleasure of interviewing two of Yahoo’s rising stars, VP of Product Strategy Bradley Horowitz and leader of the Technology Development Group Caterina Fake (one of the co-founders of Flickr). They are both part of what is loosely termed an R&D team, which other Yahoo business units … Read more

This is a personal/work post, to explain one of my current projects Micro Media Corporation. It’s a corporate blogging and podcasting program that aims to give business people insights into the Web20 and new media worlds. We’re currently looking for more contributers for the blogging and podcasting, so if you’re interested – please read on. … Read more

Earlier this week I noted that widget services are really ramping up now. Indeed over the past couple of days I’ve noticed lots of action in the burgeoning widgets industry, plus some excellent commentary. At the Connected Innovators program at Supernova last night PostApp revealed the high level of WidgetBox, its “web widget marketplace”. It’s … Read more

This post was written by Ryan Stewart, a Read/WriteWeb guest blogger. Note that Adobe’s use of the terms ‘Read/Write Web’ and ‘kiwi’ is not associated with this blog. There is an interesting project going on over at Adobe that aims to combine the power of Flex 2 with the potential of the Read/Write Web. The … Read more

This Monday Digg will release the next version of the enormously popular community news site digg.com. Mike Arrington and I did a TalkCrunch podcast with Digg’s co-founder and Chief Architect Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson, in which we discussed Digg’s evolution and what the new product (which they refer to as “Version 3”) offers. … Read more

Panelists: Craig Newmark (Craigslist), Saul Klein (Skype), Tina Sharkey (AOL), Mena Trott (Six Apart), Gil Penchina (Wikia) Pic: Dan Farber; from left-to-right: Tina, Mena, Saul (doing a very good Robert Di Niro impression), Gil, Craig Panel Blurb: “Users are becoming active co-creators of their media, commerce, entertainment, and communications experiences. Just how significant, though, is … Read more

This workshop, moderated by Tara Hunt, split into 4 different groups for discussions. This format worked well and the group I joined, about little companies competing against big companies (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc) was an interesting one. The premise: you’re a startup launching a product, but just as this happens you find out a Google … Read more

I missed the ‘Decentralizing Data’ session at Supernova unfortunately (still on NZ time and so slept through my alarm this morn!), but Dan Farber has the story about Yahoo Local‘s new support for microformats. I spoke briefly to Andy Baio afterwards, so I plan to write a more in-depth post later on this news. Here’s … Read more

Paul Kedrosky points to a new service called PostApp, which is a new widgets syndication service currently in private beta. While the sign-up page doesn’t go into detail about what PostApp does, Fergus Burns from Nooked has an interesting post on this subject: “A new space is beginning to develop – widget marketing. Led initially … Read more

Today I arrived in San Francisco for two and a bit weeks of conferences and networking. This week I’m attending the Supernova conference, then it’s Dave Winer‘s BloggerCon IV and finally Chris Pirillo‘s Gnomedex. Marc Canter’s company Broadband Mechanics, who I work part-time for, is releasing People Aggregator at Gnomedex. So all the BBM team … Read more

Digg CEO Jay Adelson took time out of his busy schedule to email me some thoughts about Netscape’s new digg-inspired community news site. Jay’s thoughts below, but first some context. I’ve written two posts about the new Netscape site. In the Read/WriteWeb post I had two main points: 1) I think introducing paid editors into … Read more

Techcrunch has the scoop on the new Netscape portal beta, which bears a striking resemblance to Digg. Mike thinks it’s a “digg killer” and in terms of pure numbers it may well be. Netscape gets a surprising 811 million monthly page views, which digg is at around 200 M per month. But despite the Digg-ish … Read more

It’s a shame to hear from Bob Wyman that PubSub is in trouble and in big danger of shutting its doors. Bob says that “internal political issues” are behind PubSub’s demise and implies that this has deflected resources from actually improving the product. It’s not my place to comment on the politics, but I do … Read more