Mike Melanson

Mike Melanson is a Writer for ReadWriteWeb, joining the team in December 2009. Mike is an ex-Austinite living in San Francisco, where he is wandering the streets in hopes of finding the real tech stories of our time. He considers himself a sort of technomad cyclist and has a background in co-ops, collectives, coding, hacking and BBSes. He has a bachelors from Bard College and a masters in journalism from the University of Texas. He is @rwwmike on Twitter and you can reach him by email at mike@readwriteweb.com.

Posts by Mike Melanson

Friday, 21st September 2012

Craigslist, 3taps & The Court Battle For The Soul Of Public Data

Craigslist, 3taps & The Court Battle For The Soul Of Public Data

Who owns the kind of information collected by Craigslist? The classifieds site has staked its claim in a series of lawsuits against apartment listings mapper PadMapper and Craigslist data scraper 3taps. On Monday, 3taps will file a bold counterclaim, aiming for a victory that would bring a new era of pubilc information.

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Thursday, 26th May 2011

How Mobile is Changing the Way We Work

Once upon a time, things didn't happen now, they happened later. Editing a document meant volleying back and forth over email or fax, meetings were something everyone had to be in the same place for and group communication on-the-go meant saying "hold on, let me call you right back" over and over. Then came the real-time Web. If there's…

Mobile Mike Melanson comments

Friday, 20th May 2011

EFF Calls On Apple to Defend Developers Against Patent Trolls

Earlier this month, patent-holding company Lodsys started going after small-time iOS developers, sending them "notice" letters which claim the developers are infringing on one of Lodsys' patents for in-app purchasing technology. In these notices, Lodsys demands that developers license the patent from them for 0.575% of the U.S. revenue…

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Google Maps Mobile Matches Pace With the Web

I don't know about you, but when it comes down to figuring out the "where" of my life on my smartphone, Google Maps is pretty much it. On the Android, the Maps experience is great and complete, but on iOS, the maps app can be a bit lacking. Thankfully, Google offers an equalizer in its mobile website - which comes complete with biking…

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Thursday, 19th May 2011

Google eBooks Get Search, Translation & Definitions

Pick up a book like James Joyce's Ulysses and you'll likely want a library at your side to help define, translate and help give the context needed to understand the plethora of heady content inside. Before the days of the Internet, reading some of the more scholarly literary texts involved just that - having a dictionary or other reference…

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Google Wants to Kill the URL

Since Google's official unveiling of the Chrome Web Store six months ago, the company has been on a mission to redefine our perception of what constitutes an operating system, a browser and a program, blurring the lines between each. In Google's world, an OS is a browser and a program - one of those hefty pieces of compiled code we used to download…

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"Uncensored" iPlayboy Hits the iPad

Apple has been clear on one thing for a while now - nothing resembling porn of any kind shall grace the screens of its iOS devices if it has anything to do with it. Of course, that's not a world that Playboy founder Hugh Hefner wants to live in and last January the robe-wearing, pipe-toting extravagant promised an uncensored version of Playboy…

Mobile Mike Melanson comments

Google Takes Social Search Global, +1 Coming Soon

The latest battle in the land of search engines is social search - the addition of signals from social graphs to bring users increasingly personalized search results. To that end, Google has been working on its offering the longest, first introducing the idea back in 2009 when it launched in the U.S. Today, the company announced that it is…

Social Mike Melanson comments

Tuesday, 17th May 2011

2WAY Q&A: Layar's Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald

Maarten Lens-FitzGerald is part of our impressive lineup of speakers at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit. As part of our ongoing series of interviews with those speakers, we fired off a round of questions at Lens-FitzGerald to learn a little more about who he is, what he does, and what he'll be talking about at the summit. RWW: When was the first time…

Play Mike Melanson comments

Why Bing Could Beat Google in Social Search

When you look at the numbers, there's no doubt that Google is the clear leader among search engines. But if recent moves by Google and Bing, in which both added social indicators to their search algorithms, are any indication, then social search could be the thing of the future. We have to wonder then, if social search is indeed the next big…

Mike Melanson comments

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