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 leaps and bounds, the online advertising revenue was flowing in, and I’d just...

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 “culture-tech”: digital technology that is transforming the cultural industries....

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 textual formats like blogs and print books. Text content is certainly not dead, of...

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 their bearish tendencies. In the following two articles in this audio vs text...

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 this was also happening with the books of Jordan Peterson, a middle-aged self help...

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 content. Once again I have to caution: I don’t see this as competing with social...

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 of social networking. Of the two products, only Tumblr continued to be described...

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 culture. The report, entitled Interactive Aotearoa (9MB PDF), was released this...

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 noughties HTML glory, via the Wayback Machine? The answer, as you’ll see below: it...

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 ‘yes’. Although after doing my own research today, I discovered that AI is both...

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 Twitter. But aside from its cool factor, Instagram is increasingly being used in the...

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 the five episodes, I discovered there was a companion podcast. It’s hosted by...