Cybercultural
Cybercultural
Richard MacManus
Cybercultural chronicles internet history and its cultural impact, from the pre-web era to the dot-com boom, Web 2.0, and beyond. Written by pioneering tech blogger Richard MacManus.
Latest Posts
At the start of 2010 I was running ReadWriteWeb, a tech blog that helped define and chronicle the Web 2.0 era. We had run our first conference the previous year, in Mountain View in the heart of Silicon Valley. The site was growing in...
Every December going back to 2004, I’ve done an end-of-year review of the top Internet technology trends. This is my sixteenth year doing this, but the 2019 review will be a little different. This year I’ll be focusing on what I call...
In this third and final part of my audio vs text series, I examine where podcasts fit into the cultural content landscape. The thesis of this series is that audio formats, such as podcasting and audiobooks, have in some ways replaced...
In last week’s article, I analyzed the rise of audio formats in comparison to the decline in print formats. Specifically: podcasts and audiobooks are on a bull run in the content market, whereas blogs, print books and ebooks continue...
On The Bill Simmons Podcast this month, author Malcolm Gladwell said something that startled me: the audiobook version of his latest book, Talking to Strangers, was outselling the hard cover after the first week on sale. He mentioned...
Last week I argued that blogs, Tumblr and email newsletters can offer an alternative to the Black Mirror world of social media we currently live in. In particular, that we can build this new world — the blogosphere 2.0 — around cultural...
Tumblr was founded early 2007, around the same time Twitter was spun off into its own company. At the time, both were labelled “microblogging” — a clumsy term that tried to bridge the existing blogging world with the still nascent trend...
A new report argues that not only should online gaming, virtual reality experiences and mixed reality apps — “interactive media” — be talked about in the same breath as movies, music and books, they’re also essential to the future of...
Have you ever had any of these issues lately while trying to access content? You wrote a blog in the early to late 2000s, but it’s long since gone (or changed irrevocably, in my case). Can you still experience that blog in all its...
Can Artificial Intelligence create music you want to listen to, TV you want to watch, books you want to read, or news you want to consume? If the industry news feeds I’ve been tracking daily are any indication, the answer is increasingly...
Last week Mary Meeker delivered her annual Internet Trends report and as usual it was chock full of useful data. This slide was one of a number that caught my eye: Instagram is the app that teens flock to these days, not Facebook or...
I’ve just finished watching the HBO-Sky miniseries, Chernobyl. It was by far the best new tv series I’ve seen all year — a horrifying true story told in a masterful way by its writer, director, and actors. About midway through binging...
Initial 2019 sales data isn’t great for both print books and ebooks, according to a report in Publishers Weekly from BookExpo in NYC: After six straight years of growth in print sales, 2019 is off to a rocky start for publishers. At a...
While the internet undoubtedly made it much easier to publish a product — be it a piece of music, a book, a magazine, a movie or tv show, or anything else that can be divided into ones and zeros — it’s become increasingly difficult to...
Podcasting has been a growth industry this year, particularly after Spotify announced its intentions to rapidly expand into podcasting back in February. Podcasting is still a tiny industry compared to radio, but recent moves by both...