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 following chapter will have a number of sections, which you’ll receive as posts via email. There is also a roadmap (table of contents), which lists all the sections in...

My book, Bubble Blog: From Outsider to Insider in Silicon Valley's Web 2.0 Revolution, was serialized on Cybercultural over 2024 and is now available to purchase: Paperback, US$19.99: Amazon; Bookshop.org eBook, US$9.99: Amazon Kindle Store; Apple Books; Google Play Or search for "Bubble Blog MacManus" on your local...

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 2.0 Revolution. I will be serializing the book here on Cybercultural, starting this week, and it will also be released as a paperback in 2024. Bubble Blog is a memoir...

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 the California town of Richmond, about twenty minutes drive from San Francisco. I’d bought a ticket to “go behind–the-scenes at the physical archive” on Wednesday, Oct....

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 September 2005 (US). I was thrilled to come across this, for several reasons: It’s a rare screenshot of what RWW looked like at that time, because unfortunately the...

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 months; every weekday, before breakfast in the early morning. My plan is still to serialize the book here on Cybercultural, which I’m hoping to start within 2-3 months....

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 gone to SXSW that year, but I arrived in San Francisco the month after for Web 2.0 Expo. I don’t recall who told me about Twitter (it may’ve been mentioned in a...

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 post was filled with optimism for the web and made the case that a new era was just beginning. A “Web 2.0,” if you will (although that term had yet to be...

Microblogging was a trend that emerged in the second half of the 2000s, after long-form weblogs had become established in the culture. Microblogging is basically just short-form blogging and, as I’ll lay out in this post, its heyday was in the 2007-11 period. But microblogging is now making a comeback, in the form...

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 Learning story. In her pitch, the PR rep had called Foursquare a “location data platform.” All this piqued my interest as a tech journalist, as I’m currently writing a...

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, people I met and places I visited, but also occasionally I will get lost down a rabbit hole of someone’s Flickr photos from the 2004-07 range (which are the years I’ve...

David Bowie's website circa August-September 1998. In late 1996, just before his 50th birthday concert at Madison Square Garden and before his latest album ‘Earthling’ was released, David Bowie had quietly approved the development of what was to become his biggest internet legacy: BowieNet. It was to be more than...