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  Some of you old webheads might enjoy my latest post on Latent Space. It turns out the Semantic Web is alive and well, in the form of ontologies being used to keep LLMs honest. https://www.latent.space/p/ontologies-agentic-systems

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  My personal reflections on a hectic and inspiring week in San Francisco, covering the AI Engineer World's Fair. https://agenticweb.news/ai-engineer-worlds-fair/

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  RIP Sam Neill, one of New Zealand’s finest. https://youtu.be/ScAktnImPbQ?si=NOVvMekDSu68lPBL

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  Simon Reynolds, one of my favourite authors, on blogging in the 2000s. He still blogs to this day, unusually running multiple Blogspot sites, one for each book and/or genre he writes about. I subscribe to all of them in my Feedbin / NetNewsWire setup, and dip in from time to time. Also some other music bloggers, especially of the esoteric variety. Alas, tech bloggers aren’t as active these days…or as interesting, tbh. I like that early 2000s energy of the mp3 bloggers.

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  RE: https://indieweb.social/@classicweb/116929145754944569 My @classicweb bot is up and running again. Per below, I've been rather distracted with real-life priorities in recent months, but I spent some time with Codex yesterday and today in order to make the bot far more automated. Now it just needs approvals from me once per day, so will post on a regular cadence once more.

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  Today's my first day in a new role: Head of Editorial at Latent Space. From ReadWriteWeb to The New Stack, I've always loved being at the cutting edge of tech x media. So I'm thrilled to join swyx & his team! p.s. given that AI tech talk typically gets a hostile reception on the fediverse, I likely won't post about my work much here. But if you are interested in these topics, I encourage you to subscribe to my articles: https://www.latent.space/

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  This week's Agentic Web News covers the rise of the agentic web as a concept, browsers integrated into the agentic tools of OpenAI and Anthropic, real momentum for the WebMCP protocol, plus further agentic commerce and web development news. https://agenticweb.news/browsers-in-agents-webmcp-momentum/ #AgenticWeb

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  Tim Berners-Lee at a book event. I like his framing of how online advertising pre-Facebook dominance was actually a good thing for the web. Eg it allowed me to employ >20 people in my blogging business, & it wasn’t invading anyone’s privacy. “In the beginning, he said “it wasn’t all bad”, describing how bloggers could have adverts on the sides of their posts and could make some earnings from their work. This was before the advent of targeted ads and marketing, he said.” https://...

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  Well said. “…the web is not a collection of technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The web is a philosophical choice to build a system that puts humans as its core constituency. The platform of technologies designed with that philosophy in mind may include AI-related systems. But if they are going to be part of the web, then they must be designed to put humans first.” https://mastodon.social/@torgo/116782804517736182

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  Agentrification, Promptotype, Wrapplication: New Words for Work https://aboard.com/more-new-words-for-new-work/ (by @ftrain)

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  My latest newsletter -> This week's market signals suggest the conversation is moving beyond AI models and toward enterprise infrastructure. AWS + Adobe are using MCP to connect enterprise agents, Vercel has launched its eve framework, Okta has published an agent identity roadmap, and Google has proposed an open discovery layer. Together they point to the emergence of an enterprise agent stack. https://agenticweb.news/agent-stack-becomes-enterprise-infrastructure/ #AgenticWeb

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  I will say this about the fediverse: it’s not the kind of place where a company or someone still working there will post “We’re expanding and hiring!” just a few months after it laid off 75% of its staff. Small mercies.

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  Very sad to hear of the passing of Om Malik (@Onmyom), one of the OG tech bloggers. Our blogs worked together at the Crunchies in 2007 (https://cybercultural.com/p/026-rww-redesign-2007-crunchies/) and earlier that year I'd met up with him at a local SF cafe (https://cybercultural.com/p/024-readwriteweb-key-hire-hustle-culture/). Even though we were jostling for position on the Technorati charts at the time, he was the nicest, wisest, most generous with his advice person in Silicon Valle...

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  "Hey...let's be careful out there." Prompted by the immortal words of Sgt. Phil Esterhaus on Hill Street Blues, I look at two lessons from RunSignup’s careful AI rollout: 1. Embed AI where users already work. 2. Move fast — but safely. I also reflect on some of the negative feedback about agentic AI this week — including continued layoffs in our industry and a lack of user trust in AI. https://ricmac.org/2026/05/29/agentic-ai-business-lessons/ #AI #AgenticWeb

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  Curious find of the day: the AI community on X has seemingly re-discovered the World Wide Web, in that it now favours HTML over Markdown for “agents to communicate with us”: https://x.com/trq212/status/2052809885763747935?s=43 #AI #WhatGoesAroundComesAround

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  What is the agentic web? I’ve published a new post defining the term and placing it in the broader history of the web: Read web → Read/write web → Platform web → Agentic web My core argument is that websites are not disappearing. They still matter, especially because the web is fundamentally a human construct. But their role is expanding, because (like it or not) AI agents will increasingly be used by people to access and interact with websites. https://ricmac.org/2026/05/08/what-is-the-agent...

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  AX was the new DX. Now it’s becoming the new UX. In my latest post, I explore how "agent experience" has morphed beyond "developer experience" and become a branch of "user experience". https://ricmac.org/2026/05/05/agent-experience-new-ux/ #AgenticWeb #AI

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  Testing the #AgenticWeb feed from tags.pub -> this post should show up on @agenticweb, which you can follow if you’re interested in the topic. (Cool new service from @evan@mastodon.social that spreads tagged content further than normal; apparently just following a hashtag in Mastodon etc isn’t as effective as you’d think)

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  "Today’s social media platforms are no longer centered around sociable activities. Instead, most platforms offer us a broadcast medium and invite us to learn how to game the algorithms so that we too can create assets for the major corporations." 🔥 🔥 🔥 from @zephoria@mastodon.social https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051261437487

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  A personal poll...I'm just curious what the responses will be. I have takes / thoughts on various AI tools, e.g. the new version of OpenAI's Codex, or the latest Claude hot thing. I honestly don't know where to post about AI, given the generally anti-AI sentiment on the fediverse. But I want to continue posting most of my stuff on Mastodon, so... The question: are you interested in AI-related posts from me? (in addition to my typical open web fare)

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  Happy Web Freedom Day to those who celebrate (i.e. everyone who uses the fediverse): “Just over a week after Mosaic 1.0 was released, CERN gifted the Web to the world as open source software. As of 30 April 1993, the still relatively new Internet communications platform was suddenly free for anyone to use, with no strings attached.” https://cybercultural.com/p/1993-mosaic-launches-and-the-web-is-set-free/

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  YES!!! In all honesty, I have struggled to post to Mastodon ever since I started my professional focus on the agentic web (after losing my journalism job in Feb, I am trying to get a one-man consulting biz off the ground, focused on Web x AI). I think there is a very healthy debate to be had here about how the open web can benefit from agentic tech…and tbh, can actually take the lead on this if folks get behind it. Controversial, I know. Glad #FediForum is discussing it. https://www.timothychamb...

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  Reflections on 23 years of blogging; and why I still raise a toast to the real RWW, despite what’s happened to it over the past decade. https://ricmac.leaflet.pub/3mjwy6k77u22q

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  “The future is much more likely to be AI embedded inside a million bespoke workflows, not a million bespoke workflows jammed into a single AI interface. For product leaders and designers, that’s a big opportunity.” https://bigmedium.com/ideas/links/saas-is-dead-benedict-evans.html

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  Paul Ford ( @ftrain) is blogging again and I’ve found his posts speaking to me, like they did 20+ years ago. Helps that I’m about the same age as him, so I can identify with the career and life angst he writes about. Also it’s something to do with me enjoying dipping into blogs again, since a lot of social media posts are really offputting nowadays (I hate this, I hate that, etc). “…while I am many places right now, I am not in career heaven. So I took the train home.” https://ftrain.com/whoomp...

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  New from my Web AI Lab: I’ve built an “article assistant” for my site that runs using local AI in the browser (via Chrome + Gemini Nano) when available — and falls back to a cloud model when it isn’t. Before you dismiss this because it's AI, I think this has huge implications for the #OpenWeb. Instead of sending every interaction to BigTech clouds, users can increasingly run AI on their own device: better privacy, lower cost & more user control. Check it out: https://ricmac.org...

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  Apparently it’s 20 years since Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet. On that same day, 21 March 2006, I was blathering on about “microcontent design” on ReadWriteWeb. This was the feeds world that web geeks like me wanted to become a reality: i.e. web standards-based feeds, using RSS/Atom, structured blogging, microformats, etc. Little did we know that Twitter would introduce the concept of proprietary feeds to the internet…and that would win out over web standards. https://web.archive.org/web/20060...

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  In my current jobless state, I’ve found it hard to focus on anything other than finding a way to earn an income again…and family stuff. So my days are filled up with my Web AI projects (mostly head-down at this stage), family (picking up kids from school, taking them to swimming lessons, etc), looking at the job boards and usually throwing my hands in the air, and just generally feeling anxious. It’s also meant I can’t focus on writing internet history or even post on Mastodon. Weird times.

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  Most people think AI will reduce the importance of websites. I think the opposite is happening — but in a very different way. Here's how I'm looking at the emerging Agentic Web, including its opportunities for web publishers and developers...and the very real threats, too. https://ricmac.org/2026/04/07/the-agentic-web/

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  This weekend I began #blogging again like it was 2003. Leaflet, which is an AT Protocol product, reminds me a lot of Radio Userland in 2003 (when I started ReadWriteWeb). It has an informal quality and it encourages community inter-linking. I also like that it's integrated with Bluesky, so comments and even trackbacks are potentially much easier than e.g. using Webmentions with Mastodon. I want ActivityPub to go this direction, too. I expand on all this in my Leaflet: https://ricmac.leaf...