Tag: rww

ReadWriteWeb Acquired By SAY Media

In the years I’ve been blogging about social media, even before we thought that Web 2.0 was a cool and cutting-edge term, ReadWriteWeb has been among the feeds I follow. So I knew (or at least emailed and otherwise interacted with) Richard MacManus when he was an ambitious and hardworking blogger. I continued to follow RWW as it became a new media property (whatever that means) and added staff, such as Marshall Kirkpatrick.

I’ll continue to follow RWW as it moves into the third stage. Having been a blog and a media property, it’s now part of a media empire. RWW has been acquired by SAY Media.

Richard, sincere congratulations. I hope that this is a very profitable event financially. I also hope that it is not an exit from RWW for you as a blogger.

HTML5: Which nest(s) should it foul?

HTML5 kills the blog format! That’s the hope, if not quite the prediction, made by Scott Fulton at RWW. There’s a lot to like about the post. For example, Scott acknowledges that it’s strange to wish for the death of the very format you are using to express your wish.

But I’m not sure that Scott is aiming the HTML5 gun at the appropriate target. He detests “the fast food of today’s publishing society.” So do I, but blogs are, by today’s standards, leisurely and thoughtful repasts. His main complaint, though, concerns formatting.

The blog format relieves publishers from the tiresome duty of producing covers and front pages and things to make their content more attractive and make readers want it. In some cases, it enables publishers to surrender any responsibility for making content attractive in the first place.

This may have been true a couple of years ago. But it ignores the work done at WordPress, Tumblr, and other platforms to provide tools for the management of content – including the very aspects on which Scott focuses.

If Scott wants to aim to HTML5 gun at any platforms, for the reasons he states, then he has at least two targets more appropriate than blog/content management platforms. I refer to Facebook and Twitter. Each enables and hosts the production of vast amounts of fast food, in generic containers.

I expect to be blogging, probably using WordPress, for years after HTML5 makes its mark on the web. I’m less sure that I’ll be using Facebook and/pr Twitter that long. How about you?