Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: Richard MacManus

Web 2.0 Expo: My Recap on Read/Write Web

April 23, 2007 / / 1 Comment

Just saw the post up on Read/Write Web that includes my recap of the Web 2.0 Expo event last week in San Francisco. Web2expo Richard MacManus published his take earlier, then followed with this one that includes my thoughts and those of two other writers that contribute to R/WW and happened to be at the event.

By the way, congrats to Richard on the fourth anniversary of Read/Write Web! He’s come a very long way since those early days — from spare-time sideline to media property. Quite an entrepreneurial story, and one with a international component, too, since Richard has more of a global bent being based in New Zealand. Readwriteweblogo
Richard also used to blog for ZDnet, but now is fulltime on R/WW. What makes the blog so well followed is that it does analysis, not just news bursts about the latest deals and startup launches (though it covers its share of those, too). It’s been amazing to watch its growth.

Web 2.0 Expo: My Coverage on Read/Write Web

April 20, 2007 / / 1 Comment

My first guest post went up on Read/Write Web a couple of days ago. It’s called Widgetsphere: New Playground For Marketers, and it’s about a session I attended at the Web 2.0 Expo this week in SF. Readwriteweblogo The CEOs of two widget syndication networks, Widgetbox and Clearspring, spoke about how widgets are becoming a must in the Internet marketer’s toolbox. (I covered Widgetbox a bit back in September 2006 when they debuted at DemoFall.) Widgetboxlogo

Anyway, it was fun getting to Web 2.0 Expo and meeting Richard MacManus, editor and publisher of Read/Write Web. What a hard-working guy! And now a media mogul in his own right… 🙂 He’s based in Wellington, New Zealand, but flew to California for a few weeks to attend the Expo and do some other business. Clearspringlogo Watch for another link to Read/Write Web soon, a recap of the whole Web 2.0 Expo experience. And I hope to be writing for this great blog again in the future. It was also fun hanging out again with Alex Iskold, a regular writer at Read/Write Web, who’s also founder of AdaptiveBlue. Alex is not only a smart guy and a great writer, but a fun guy, too! We had some laughs at the party Tuesday night snatching appetizers from the carts as they wheeled by on the way to the buffet lines, which were waay too long to stand in… 🙂

Shut Down by Google, They’re Baack – with ‘iReader’

February 20, 2007 / / 0 Comments

A Minneapolis-based tech firm, almost put out of business by Google last year with for scraping its site with its ePrecis technology, is back today as Syntactica. [As Syntactica president Henry Neils said to me last week, “Like they don’t scrape everything out there.” Hah!] Under this new company name, they’re introducing the iReader Web Previewer tool. Ireaderlogo So, take that Google! It previews the content of a web link without clicking on it — by studying the language, the linguistics, behind it. Pretty heavy stuff, but this team of developers has been working on perfecting this technology for years, so this is certainly no upstart. Perhaps they’re onto an application of it now that will stick, and that the powers-that-be will allow to happen. User acceptance will tell the story, of course, and that’s why reaction in the blogosphere will be big for these guys. Smartly, they’re opening the technology up via open source XML web services, I learned last week.

Ireadernytimes

Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web has already done a great post called iReader Previews The Content Behind Links. It tells the story well, so I won’t repeat it. It’s also worth taking a look back to see what he blogged about ePrecis in October 2005 on ZDnet, calling it “next generation search.” [By the way, the old ePrecis site, which, interestingly, still shows up in a Google search(!), won’t seem to come up today. Must be getting hit too hard.]

The beta they just launched is an easy plug-in install for IE or Firefox (Mac or PC), and it’s sure to create a lot of conversation out there. Try it out on some of your favorite news sites, like the NY Times, CNN, MSN, etc. Seems to work great on the story links down near the bottom of the NY Times page, for example, where stories are grouped into categories. Let me know what you think. Or better yet, tell the company: they’re about to launch their blog, too, where you can do that.

Note one VERY KEY thing: you can turn the iReader plug-in on or off! So, if it’s bothersome to have these little “preview windows” showing up for you on some sites, just right-click your mouse to toggle it on and off. Not sure how you do it on a Mac yet, though, in Firefox. I think they’re adding some notes on the downloading page…

[Disclaimer: I have a consulting relationship with Syntactica.]

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