2009

The year is fast winding down and everyone is no doubt looking forward to a break over Christmas. If you want some reading and pondering material over the holidays, during December we’ve been publishing a series of annual review posts. We’ve picked our best products of the year in 10 categories, analyzed the top companies … Read more

Every year the ReadWriteWeb team tries its hand at predicting the future. Looking back at our 2009 predictions, we got some wrong (I predicted that Facebook would sign up to OpenSocial) but others turned out to be on the money. I correctly guessed that the usual suspects would remain unacquired in ’09 – Digg, Twitter, … Read more

Don’t worry, it’s not Twitter! For our Best LittleCo of 2009, we’ve chosen a small company whose product launched in 2009 and quickly became a leading example of one of the year’s big trends: the real-time web. Our pick for Most Promising is something that could change the way people search on the Web. Last … Read more

One of the interesting trends of 2009 has been the gradual decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news and niche topics. Many of us still use them, but less than we used to. I for one still maintain a Google Reader account, however I don’t check it on … Read more

Spotted this evening on the U.S. government’s public data web site, Data.gov. A Republican programmer at captcha provider reCAPTCHA having some fun? Hat-tip ReadWriteWeb’s Marketing manager Elyssa Pallai, who stumbled upon this humor gem today. Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)

In this special edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our weekly newsletter, we summarize our end-of-year series profiling the best web products of 2009. We also carried out a Reader Poll this week, asking our readers to select their favorite products of the year. We present the results of that poll here. Finally, this week we … Read more

This week we ran a reader poll, asking for your votes on the top Web products of the year. Thousands of you voted for up to 10 products, from a list of 100 selected by the ReadWriteWeb authors over December. The poll has now closed and we’re pleased to present the ReadWriteWeb community’s Top 10 … Read more

We’re down to the final day of voting for ReadWriteWeb’s reader-selected Top 10 Web Products of 2009. You can vote for up to 10 products, from a list of 100 selected by the ReadWriteWeb authors over December. Make your picks in the poll embedded below. You can cast up to 10 votes. If you don’t … Read more

BlueKai is an online marketing firm that provides data to marketers, ad networks and publishers. The main purpose of this data, held in a repository called the BlueKai Data Exchange, is to target ads to consumers. BlueKai claims to have now aggregated “intent data” from over 160 million unique users on e-commerce, online travel agency … Read more

In one of ReadWriteWeb’s longest-running traditions, every year we review the top Internet companies and their impact over the past 12 months. Today we’re announcing the 6th annual Best BigCo, a.k.a. big Internet company. Next week we’ll announce Best LittleCo and Most Promising Company. In 2008 the Best BigCo went to Apple, due largely to … Read more

Morgan Stanley has released a couple of bulky documents about the mobile Internet: ‘The Mobile Internet Report,’ a 424-page report which explores eight major themes; and ‘The Mobile Internet Report Key Themes,’ a 659-slide presentation that drills down on thoughts covered in the report. We’ve embedded both documents below. Perhaps the most remarkable statement in … Read more

Over December we have published our best Web products of 2009 over ten posts. This week we’ve opened up our selections for you to vote on. The poll is embedded below and we invite you to select your favorite web products of 2009. You can vote for up to 10 products. If you don’t see … Read more

In my recent post about the rise of content farms like Demand Media and the current incarnation of AOL, I posited that Google (and search in general) risks becoming less relevant as the Web gets drowned in lesser quality content. This is due to the scale at which these content farms are operating at – … Read more

Over December we have published ten Top 10 lists for the best products of 2009, in categories ranging from Consumer Web Apps to Real-Time Technologies. Now we’re opening up our selections for you to vote on. We’ve embedded a poll below, with all 100 products that the ReadWriteWeb team selected. We invite you to vote … Read more

I’ve been writing a lot about so-called ‘content farms’ in recent months – companies like Demand Media and Answers.com which create thousands of pieces of content per day and are making a big impact on the Web. Both of those two companies are now firmly inside the top 20 Web properties in the U.S., on … Read more