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.
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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 incentives over two years for him and the other writers, so he wouldn’t have been left out...
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. YouTube and Reddit were just a couple of the future all-star web products launched in...
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, I saw on Techmeme that Condé Nast had acquired the technology blog Ars Technica for an...
Tuesday’s financial discussions were with Kobi Levy and Jake Stein from Insight Partners, the private equity firm that was buying ReadWriteWeb on behalf of Ziff Davis Enterprise. Jake looked like he’d just come out of business school...
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 the border in Canada, a photo sharing site called Flickr was released. Then in April,...
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 ReadWriteWeb writer and now my business advisor, who was based somewhere in greater New...
NYC from above; photo taken by author in May 2008. 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 had linked to us in the last six...
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 — and the after-life this can have, which sometimes (maybe most of the time?) can be...
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 thought over the past 12 hours or so,” I wrote, “and it really is time for me to make a...
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 just hired from (of course) CMP. The dinner reservation was at a restaurant called...
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. He was a big-boned guy, a couple of inches taller than me, with brown hair and...
'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 expand the business. Early in the new year Sean Ammirati put me in touch with Bob Evans, a...
In early November 2007 Mike Arrington and his TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde approached me about participating in a new awards competition they’d come up with, “the Crunchies.” The idea (as far as I could tell) was to replicate the Webby...
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 coastal town near the top of the South Island of New Zealand. My wife and six-year-old...
MySpace party during the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit; from left to right: Prashant Agarwal, me, Sean Ammirati; photo by Brian Solis. In August 2007, I began discussions with Marshall Kirkpatrick, a former TechCrunch lead blogger who was now...