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
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 Twitter. In addition, smartphone apps became prolific — especially with the release of...
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 2010, I was headed to Austin for South by Southwest (SXSW), the popular internet...
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 Web Summit, in Mountain View that October of 2009, my next port of call was the Web 2.0...
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 Store launched in July (along with a second-generation iPhone) and the Android Market...
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 the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, a Friday, the RWW team met up at the Red Rock café in...
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 the unconference. I was nervous and apprehensive about how the day would go — this was...
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 year of the smartphone, with both the iPhone and Android launching that year. But for...
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 expert on digital identity. The key aspect of an unconference was that it wasn’t based...
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 percent) of visits were from Firefox users, with 25 percent using IE. Safari (12.5 percent)...
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 Semantic Web (it was always capitalized at the time). In May I’d done a presentation...
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 September, Facebook debuted its “news feed” and opened registrations for all people (not just...
Due largely to the SUL, RWW's Twitter a/c went from 13,300 followers in May 2009 to 256,000 by the end of June. By year's end, we'd matched Ashton Kutcher with over 1 million followers. After I returned from my latest Silicon Valley trip...
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 Internet Archive. As the new year dawned, I wrote up some goals for 2009 in the red 3B1...
Team ReadWriteWeb during the 2008 Web 2.0 Summit; Sean Ammirati, Bernard Lunn, me, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Alex Iskold. In late October 2008, my wife and I traveled over to the United States again on my annual pilgrimage to the Web 2.0...
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 even web geeks didn't quite know what to make of Twitter. Was it an “IM/blogging...