What followed Web 2.0 was not Web 3.0 (or Web3 for that matter), but a degraded version of the internet. Maybe we should call it Web -1.0, but a more scatological term has taken hold instead: enshittification. It describes a period, roughly during the 2010s, when internet platform companies like Facebook, Twitter...

Digital Archaeology exhibit at Internet Week 2011; photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid. Before I left for New York in the first week of June 2011, I reviewed our May traffic. It was dismal. We’d had our lowest monthly total page views since last November. Even worse, our unique visitors were the lowest they’d been...

RWW management team, SXSW 2011; from left to right: Richard MacManus, Sean Ammirati, Marshall Kirkpatrick; photo by Shashi Bellamkonda. After the ReadWriteWeb management meetings and in-between the SXSW partying, I met up with Sarah Perez to talk about the editorial issues. She was pleased to hear that Abraham would...

The internet in 2010 was when social media conquered the world, as people flocked to Facebook and Twitter to have their say. Much of this was driven by smartphone apps — not just from the established players, but by newer apps like Instagram (the first truly mobile-native photo sharing app) and the location-based...

Me being interviewed by Pelpina Trip from WebBeat.tv, SXSW 2011. During the first couple of months of 2011, Sean was busy renegotiating ReadWriteWeb’s revenue deal with FM Publishing. In early March he delivered the new contract to me for my signature. Sean had done well. Although FM would continue to take a decent...

Me posing next to the Xerox ParcPad from 1992, an ancestor of the iPad (which was released in 2010); photo on the right is from a group dinner in San Francisco, October 2010. In July, as I was trying to make progress on a number of troublesome fronts — including filling in paperwork for a US working visa and filing...

Screenshot of ReadWriteWeb in September 2010. Note: this is from a rare full-page screenshot of classic RWW, so most of the other images in this post will feature other parts of that particular RWW page. You can view the full screen capture here (thanks charlene mcbride!) Throughout 2010 we released a few more...

One year ago, I launched the serialization of my third book, a memoir entitled Bubble Blog: From Outsider to Insider in Silicon Valley's Web 2.0 Revolution. The book covers the years 2003-2012, the time in which I created ReadWriteWeb and built it into one of the top 10 blogs in the world (also syndicated on The New...

ReadWriteWeb Twitter account, 31 August 2010. In July 2010 we finally began the process of advertising for a new community manager, after Jolie’s departure in March. We wanted someone who was an active user of social media tools and who had experience managing online communities. Ideally, we were looking for someone...

After my trips to New York and Portland, I flew back to San Francisco. I first attended the SemTech conference for the second year running. However, the most interesting event I went to that week was at Singularity University (SU), located at the NASA Ames Research Park near Mountain View. I was taken to SU by a...

RWW's coworking day at Urban Grind café; clockwise from left-back: me, Alex Williams, Deane Rimerman, Audrey Watters, Marshall Kirkpatrick; photo by Abraham Hyatt. Note: This post is dedicated to Curt Hopkins, who sadly passed away in February this year at age 60. As you'll read below, we had a battle in June 2010,...

Me at our first NYC event, in June 2010. Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid. It was another late arrival coming into New York — near midnight on Sunday, June 6 — but this time I had booked a hotel in Manhattan. It was a fifteen-minute walk from the Metropolitan Pavilion, our Real-Time Web Summit venue. That would...