Feed - Cybercultural

Buy the Book: Bubble Blog Now Available As Paperback, eBook 🔗

I’m thrilled to announce that my book, Bubble Blog: From Outsider to Insider in Silicon Valley's Web 2.0 Revolution, is now available to purchase as a [...]

The Deal Is Done: ReadWriteWeb Sells to SAY Media 🔗

When I arrived in San Francisco on Saturday, December 3, I was hoping to close the deal with SAY Media by the end of the week. Sean and I would be in [...]

SAY Media Offers To Acquire ReadWriteWeb 🔗

SAY Media's Troy Young at the company's Create 2011 event; image via YouTube. It was Thursday, October 20, 2011, and I only had one meeting on my sche [...]

The Last Web 2.0 Conference and RWW Acquisition Talks 2.0 🔗

2011 edition of the Web 2.0 Map; via Wayback Machine. To prepare for the San Francisco M&A meetings, I’d created a ReadWriteWeb Vision presentation an [...]

Before My Latest Portland Trip, I Decide To Sell ReadWriteWeb 🔗

Marshall and I reflecting on our ReadWriteWeb adventure at the Green Dragon pub, Portland, October 2011. Note: I'm not sure who took this photo, but I [...]

RWW Writer Exodus — the Blog Business Pressures Pile Up 🔗

ReadWriteWeb homepage, August 2011; image via Wayback Machine. After the 2WAY Summit (in June 2011), I confirmed with Marshall that he was okay with m [...]

The ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit NYC, 2011 🔗

Jason Calacanis and Abraham Hyatt at the 2WAY Summit; photo by Shashi Bellamkonda. We couldn’t have asked for a better venue. The Roone Arledge Audito [...]

The Enshittocene: How the Internet Got Worse in the 2010s 🔗

What followed Web 2.0 was not Web 3.0 (or Web3 for that matter), but a degraded version of the internet. Maybe we should call it Web -1.0, but a more [...]

The Great Editorial Pivot of 2011 As RWW Struggles Continue 🔗

Digital Archaeology exhibit at Internet Week 2011; photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid. Before I left for New York in the first week of June 2011, I [...]

Team RWW Meetings at SXSW 2011 and a Crisis of Confidence 🔗

RWW management team, SXSW 2011; from left to right: Richard MacManus, Sean Ammirati, Marshall Kirkpatrick; photo by Shashi Bellamkonda. After the Read [...]

What the Internet Was Like in 2010 🔗

The internet in 2010 was when social media conquered the world, as people flocked to Facebook and Twitter to have their say. Much of this was driven b [...]

SXSW 2011 and Dealing With RWW Editorial Challenges 🔗

Me being interviewed by Pelpina Trip from WebBeat.tv, SXSW 2011. During the first couple of months of 2011, Sean was busy renegotiating ReadWriteWeb’s [...]

Swapping Web 2.0 Summit for PARC; and RWW Planning for 2011 🔗

Me posing next to the Xerox ParcPad from 1992, an ancestor of the iPad (which was released in 2010); photo on the right is from a group dinner in San [...]

ReadWriteWeb Growing Pains and Managing the Writing Team 🔗

Screenshot of ReadWriteWeb in September 2010. Note: this is from a rare full-page screenshot of classic RWW, so most of the other images in this post [...]

Serializing a Book Online: Lessons From My Web 2.0 Memoir 🔗

One year ago, I launched the serialization of my third book, a memoir entitled Bubble Blog: From Outsider to Insider in Silicon Valley's Web 2.0 Revol [...]

Social Media in 2010 and the Rise of Social Referrers 🔗

ReadWriteWeb Twitter account, 31 August 2010. In July 2010 we finally began the process of advertising for a new community manager, after Jolie’s depa [...]

Foo Camp 2010 and Going Exponential at Singularity University 🔗

After my trips to New York and Portland, I flew back to San Francisco. I first attended the SemTech conference for the second year running. However, t [...]

My Trip to Portland, Home to Half of Team ReadWriteWeb 🔗

RWW's coworking day at Urban Grind café; clockwise from left-back: me, Alex Williams, Deane Rimerman, Audrey Watters, Marshall Kirkpatrick; photo by A [...]

Filter Bubbles and the RWW Real-Time Web Summit, June 2010 🔗

Me at our first NYC event, in June 2010. Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid. It was another late arrival coming into New York—near midnight on Sund [...]

Cybercultural Redesign and Web Development History Migration 🔗

Today I completed a redesign of Cybercultural, including a new navigation structure and other changes related to an upgrade in my publishing system, E [...]

New York Times HQ Visit and Emergence of Influencer Culture 🔗

I think Sean was more excited to meet Fred Wilson than I was. As a wannabe VC, he was in awe of Fred and had tried (unsuccessfully) to interview him f [...]

Burbn to Instagram: The ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit, May 2010 🔗

Team RWW at the Mobile Summit: Frederic, Chris, me, Marshall, Sean; photo via Chris Cameron. The ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit was held on Friday, May 7, [...]

ReadWriteWeb Mistaken for Facebook Login — Hilarity Ensues 🔗

As internet culture continued to go mainstream over 2010, sometimes we at ReadWriteWeb got caught in the crosshairs. In February, our website was hila [...]

SXSW Music Blues and RWW Community Manager Departs 🔗

A grainy iPhone photo I took of the bass player from Band of Skulls, when they played at Beauty Bar during SXSW Music 2010. The Ai Weiwei event was a [...]

Democracy on the Net: Onstage With Ai Weiwei and @Jack 🔗

I didn’t know much about the Paley Center for Media before I entered its impressive white stone building on Fifty-Second Street. But I knew it was abo [...]

What the Internet Was Like in 2009 🔗

Oprah's first tweet, April 2009. The internet in 2009 was all about the real-time web and the mainstreaming of social media, mostly on Facebook and Tw [...]

SXSW 2010 and RWW Co-Hosts a Party at Austin City Limits 🔗

Trey Ratcliff, Richard MacManus, Elyssa Pallai, and Sean Ammirati at The Oasis in Austin, TX. Photo by John Pozadzides. For the first time, in March 2 [...]

Web 2.0 Summit 2009 and ReadWriteWeb Hires New COO 🔗

The two Tims at Web 2.0 Summit 2009: Berners-Lee and O'Reilly; photo via O'Reilly Conferences. After running our debut event, the ReadWrite Real-Time [...]

What the Internet Was Like in 2008 🔗

The iPhone 3G and G1 (first Android device); October 2008. The internet in 2008 was defined by the emergence of smartphone apps, with the Apple App St [...]

Team RWW in Silicon Valley and a Tense Meeting With My COO 🔗

Team RWW visiting Facebook HQ in October 2009; from left to right: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Jolie O'Dell, Dana Oshiro, Bernard Lunn, me. The day after th [...]

The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, October 2009 🔗

Me at ReadWriteWeb's first in-person event. It was the morning of October 15, 2009, and I was at the Hotel Avante in Mountain View, California, for th [...]

What the Internet Was Like in 2007 🔗

Mark Zuckerberg at a developer happy hour event at Facebook HQ, August 2007. Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid. 2007 is often thought of as the ye [...]

Planning the First ReadWriteWeb Unconference 🔗

In July 2009, we began planning our first RWW event. It would be in the “unconference” format, which had been suggested to us by Kaliya Hamlin, an exp [...]

Why 2009 Was When Big Tech Began To Control Web 2.0 🔗

My FriendFeed account, August 2009. In July 2009, RWW had 2,650,000 page views, of which nearly 1.3 million were unique visitors. Nearly half (49 perc [...]

Meeting My Hero, Tim Berners-Lee, at W3C Headquarters 🔗

In June 2009, I interviewed the man who had made my entire career possible: Tim Berners-Lee. Another of my passion projects as a tech reporter was the [...]

What the Internet Was Like in 2006 🔗

No smartphones, fat laptops. Welcome to the 2006 internet! 2006 was a pivotal year in the rise of the social web. In July, Twitter launched; in Septem [...]

RWW Makes Twitter Suggested User List and Grows Team 🔗

Due largely to the SUL, RWW's Twitter account went from 13,300 followers in mid-May 2009 to 256,000 by the end of June. By year's end, we'd matched As [...]

My 2009 Googleplex Visit and RWW Launches Channels 🔗

In 2009, ReadWriteWeb was featured in the ia.net Web Trend Map, which "plots the Internet’s leading names and domains onto the Tokyo Metro map." Via I [...]

Web 2.0 Summit 2008 and Tech Media's Pivot to Business News 🔗

Team ReadWriteWeb during the 2008 Web 2.0 Summit; Sean Ammirati, Bernard Lunn, me, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Alex Iskold. In late October 2008, my wife an [...]

Curious About Early Twitter? Discover 5 Key Facts From 2007 🔗

The first big influx of people signed up to Twitter in March 2007, after it became a breakout app at the annual SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. But [...]

Indie Media Business 2.0: RWW Adds Structure and Writers 🔗

One of the first things I did after pulling out of the ZDE deal was to tell Marshall what had happened. I had penciled in a closing bonus and incentiv [...]

What the Internet Was Like in 2005 🔗

By 2005, Web 2.0 — the Web as platform — was the driving trend of Silicon Valley. It was a new tech bubble, and that meant startup launches galore. Yo [...]

Unacquired: ReadWriteWeb Pulls Out of the ZDE Deal 🔗

A frustrated looking blogger on 7 July 2008, a week before RWW withdraws from the ZDE deal. Also pictured: Puggy the pug dog. The day I left New York, [...]

Alien in New York: ReadWriteWeb & the American Dream 🔗

Tuesday’s financial discussions were with Kobi Levy and Jake Stein from Insight Partners, the private equity firm that was buying ReadWriteWeb on beha [...]

What the Internet Was Like in 2004 🔗

2004, twenty years ago, was the year that Web 2.0 truly began. In February, Facebook was quietly launched in a Harvard dorm room. Meanwhile, across th [...]

I’m Waiting For The EBITDA: Visiting the ZDE Office 🔗

The due-diligence meetings with Ziff Davis Enterprise would start at midday on Monday. But first, I had arranged to meet Bernard Lunn, a freelance Rea [...]

Due Diligence Begins in NYC; RWW Gets a Media Award 🔗

As soon as I got back home, RWW made it to the top 10 on Technorati. We were now one of the world’s ten most popular blogs, based on how many websites [...]

On Selling Your Website — It's OK to Be a Lifestyle Business 🔗

Instead of the latest installment of my serialized Web 2.0 memoir, this week I want to talk about the experience of selling a tech blogging business — [...]

A Deal Is Done; Trippy Web 2.0 Party at Temple 🔗

Early on Thursday morning, after a phone call with Bernard on the East Coast, I sent my email ultimatum to CMP/TechWeb. “I’ve given this a lot of thou [...]

Dinner at TWO, But With Which Acquirer? 🔗

Mike Azzara from Ziff Davis Enterprise had arranged a dinner for three people—he’d be bringing along a new ZDE editor named Stephen Wellman, whom he’d [...]

2008 Web 2.0 Expo, Where M&A Talks Continue 🔗

On the opening morning of the Web 2.0 Expo, I met Marshall Kirkpatrick for the first time in the press room, on the third floor of the Moscone Center. [...]

Acquisition Talks: Two Suitors For ReadWriteWeb 🔗

'Intro to RWW' slide from a March 2008 presentation. I hadn’t seriously thought of selling ReadWriteWeb before 2008, but I knew I needed help to expan [...]

ReadWriteWeb's Big Redesign & The Inaugural Crunchies 🔗

In early November 2007 Mike Arrington and his TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde approached me about participating in a new awards competition they’d come u [...]

Stress 2.0: Health Problems & Web Server Issues 🔗

The first sign of health problems came before I went to the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit. Late that September, I was traveling by car to Kaikoura, a scenic coa [...]

Read/WriteWeb Makes Key Hire & I Meet Hustle Culture 🔗

In August 2007, I began discussions with Marshall Kirkpatrick, a former TechCrunch lead blogger who was now working for a marketing company. Marshall [...]

Las Vegas and the MIX Conference 2007 🔗

After the Web 2.0 Expo, it was off to Las Vegas for Microsoft’s MIX conference, an event to promote the company’s web technologies. My travel, includi [...]

Web 2.0 Expo 2007 🔗

In April 2007, I traveled back to San Francisco for the first Web 2.0 Expo, which was being pitched as a trade show. I arrived on Friday, April 13. I [...]

Read/WriteWeb Network Launches Amid iPhone Debut 🔗

There had been rumors of a combined phone and iPod device coming from Apple, but what Steve Jobs announced at Macworld on January 9, 2007, blasted awa [...]

Betting on Web 2.0: High Stakes Blogging 🔗

On Friday I made my way from San Francisco to the TechCrunch ranch in Atherton, about forty-five minutes south down the 101. Mike was as busy as usual [...]

Lou Reed and the 2006 Web 2.0 Summit 🔗

In early November I was back in Silicon Valley to attend the annual Web 2.0 Conference, now renamed Web 2.0 Summit, and with the theme of “Disruption [...]

The Birth of Cloud Computing and Team Read/WriteWeb 🔗

During the second half of 2006, more and more of my focus was on building up Read/WriteWeb. In July 2006 I announced a major redesign of the site. The [...]

Gnomedex 2006 and My Corporate Blogging Adventure 🔗

At the end of June, 2006, I boarded a flight to Seattle for Chris Pirillo’s Gnomedex conference. For the second time, I got lucky with the weather in [...]

The Core Values of Blogging: Attending BloggerCon 2006 🔗

For the rest of the week after the Digg podcast call, I attended the 2006 Supernova conference, run by a business academic named Kevin Werbach. It was [...]

Digg and the Power Laws of Silicon Valley in 2006 🔗

In June 2006 I flew to San Francisco for my third US trip. I arrived at SFO just after midday on Monday, June 19, after another sleepless twelve-hour [...]

Reluctant Salesman: The Sponsor Ads Era of the Blogosphere 🔗

After Microsoft Search Champs in Redmond had finished, I began my journey back to New Zealand. My first layover was twelve hours at the San Francisco [...]

Visiting the Microsoft Campus in Redmond; January 2006 🔗

It was a cold but sunny Wednesday morning and a Microsoft charter bus pulled into a complex of red brick office buildings, all no more than three stor [...]

Microsoft Search Champs and the Gift Basket; January 2006 🔗

In the second week of January 2006, I got married to my partner of nine years, Maria. We had a 4-year old daughter, Rosabelle, who was one of the flow [...]

The Web 2.0 Illuminati; Are We in Another Internet Bubble? 🔗

By October 2005, I was making a reasonable living from the web as a freelancer. I’d quit my New Zealand day job in August and was now earning income f [...]

Spicy Noodles: Dave Winer and the Web 2.0 Workgroup 🔗

During my stay at the TechCrunch ranch, Mike Arrington, Fred Oliveira and I had been discussing how to better team up. At the time, creating a network [...]

Richard Goes to Yahoo! Talking RSS and Blogging in 2005 🔗

Earlier in 2005, I had made some contacts inside of Yahoo! and had begun to think about trying for a job there. One of my contacts was a search engine [...]

The Colors of Web 2.0 Party; October 2005 🔗

The Colors of Web 2.0 Party was held on Thursday, October 6, 2005, at Swig — a modern bar spread over two floors in Geary St, a few blocks up from Uni [...]

Day 2 of the 2005 Web 2.0 Conference 🔗

When I walked into the Web 2.0 Conference at the Argent the next morning, a Thursday, I poured myself a cup of hotel coffee and wandered over to one o [...]

Revving Up at the 2005 Web 2.0 Conference 🔗

The Web 2.0 Conference kicked off on Wednesday, October 5, 2005, at The Argent Hotel on Third Street in San Francisco. I’d gone into the city on the C [...]

ReadWriteWeb Growth in 2005, Before My First US Trip 🔗

A reader emailed me this screenshot of RWW in March 2005, in order to point out the MyYahoo Ticker at the bottom of the screen. “My RSS headlines stre [...]

Arriving at the TechCrunch Ranch As Web 2.0 Hype Begins 🔗

On a Friday afternoon at the end of September 2005, I stepped foot on American soil for the first time. I was greeted at San Francisco Airport by a bi [...]

A Call With Tim O’Reilly After the First Web 2.0 Conference 🔗

I hadn’t gone to the first Web 2.0 Conference in October 2004, but I monitored it from afar. I was intrigued by the potential start of a new movement [...]

Marc Andreessen in 2004: Adapting to a New Web Era 🔗

Marc Andreessen, bare feet and all, on the cover of TIME magazine in Feb 1996. At the beginning of 2004, Netscape founder Marc Andreessen was doing ju [...]

The First Web 2.0 Conference in 2004 🔗

In-between trying to get linked to by an A-Lister in the blogosphere, I inadvertently turned myself into a journalist. In March 2004, I interviewed Ma [...]

Blogging in 2003–2004: The Early Years of ReadWriteWeb 🔗

I was a long way from Silicon Valley at the beginning of 2004, both geographically and in frame of mind. I’d recently turned 32, had fine strawberry b [...]

My Web 2.0 Memoir: Table of Contents 🔗

If you are looking for a good overview of my book project, see my launch post. The following is a chronological table of contents for my book, Bubble [...]

Introduction to Bubble Blog, a Memoir of Web 2.0 (2004-2011) 🔗

Welcome to the first post in the serialization of my Web 2.0 memoir. This is the introduction, which sets the scene for the 20 chapters to come. Each [...]

Announcing Bubble Blog, My Web 2.0 Memoir 🔗

I’m excited to launch a project I’ve been working on for over a year now: a book called Bubble Blog: From Outsider to Insider in Silicon Valley's Web [...]

A Visit to the Physical Internet Archive 🔗

While I was in San Francisco for a tech conference this month, I took the opportunity to visit the Internet Archive — the actual physical archive in t [...]

Comparing Wayback Machine Copies of ReadWriteWeb to Old Screenshots 🔗

While preparing for the publication of my “Web 2.0 memoir” here on Cybercultural, I was fortunate to discover a screenshot of ReadWriteWeb from 24 Sep [...]

Book Update + My Thoughts on Generative AI and Writing 🔗

This month I finished the first draft of my “Web 2.0 memoir,” which weighed in at 153,000 words. I’ve been working on this book for the past eight mon [...]

Twitter in 2007: The Open Platform That Wasn't 🔗

The first wave of people to join Twitter was in March 2007, when it became the trendy app at the annual SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. I hadn’t gon [...]

ReadWriteWeb Turns 20 🔗

Twenty years ago, on 20 April 2003, I published the first post on a blog I had just started. Entitled The Read/Write Web, it was a manifesto of sorts. [...]

The Golden Age of Microblogging, with Soup.io and Tumblr 🔗

Microblogging was a trend that emerged in the second half of the 2000s, after long-form weblogs had become established in the culture. Microblogging i [...]

Foursquare Raps by the Go-Bang Mayor 🔗

I recently had occasion to write about Foursquare, the once popular location check-in app. I’d been emailed by its PR firm about a potential Machine L [...]

Flickr Before Smartphones and Instagram 🔗

As I’ve been writing my “Web 2.0 memoir” this year, I’ve been using Flickr a lot to look at old photos from that era — mainly conferences I went to, p [...]

BowieNet: The Inside Story of its Creation 🔗

In late 1996, just before his 50th birthday concert at Madison Square Garden and before his latest album ‘Earthling’ was released, David Bowie had qui [...]

1993: Mosaic Launches and the Web is Set Free 🔗

On 14 January 1993, Marc Andreessen put a call out on the WWW-Talk mailing list for people to test a new WWW browser in development. It was initially [...]

1992: The Web vs Gopher, and the First External Browsers 🔗

Throughout 1992, there were just a scattering of websites on the World Wide Web — somewhere between ten and twenty. A W3C page from late 1992 lists le [...]

1991: Tim Berners-Lee Tries to Convert the Hypertext Faithful 🔗

After a year and a half of stalling from CERN management, followed by a flurry of development activity over the final quarter of 1990, Tim Berners-Lee [...]

1990: Programming the World Wide Web 🔗

In the final few months of 1990, 35-year Tim Berners-Lee and his colleague Robert Cailliau developed the world’s first web client (a browser/editor), [...]

1999: The Fall of Netscape and the Rise of Mozilla 🔗

At the beginning of 1999, one company had all the momentum on the Web: Microsoft. While Netscape was adjusting to corporate life with new owner AOL an [...]

1996: Flash and CSS Bring Design to the Web 🔗

After the birth of web apps in 1993 with CGI scripts, followed by startups like Yahoo using Perl code to create dynamic websites in 1994, and then cli [...]

1995: MySQL Arrives, Completing the LAMP Stack 🔗

By the end of 1995, the foundational pieces of the open source LAMP stack for web development (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) were in place. T [...]

1995: Apache and Microsoft IIS Shake Up the Web Server Market 🔗

From January 1995 through till the end of December, the Web grew from just over 10,000 websites to 100,000. But in order to publish a website at that [...]

1994: How Perl Became the Foundation of Yahoo 🔗

In January 1994, two Stanford University graduate students — Jerry Yang and David Filo — created a web directory named “Jerry and David’s Guide to the [...]

The Time I Met Bill English 🔗

This post is to honour the one-year anniversary of the passing of Bill English, at age 91, on 26 July, 2020. English was Doug Engelbart’s right-hand m [...]

1998: Open Season with Mozilla, W3C’s DOM, and WaSP 🔗

By the start of 1998, Netscape was preparing to make a drastic move. Not only was its arch-nemesis Microsoft rapidly catching up in the browser market [...]

1997: The Year of DHTML 🔗

As we saw in the previous post, 1997 was a year of growth for JavaScript. However, it was also a year in which its limitations were recognized and a n [...]