What does "web-based" actually mean in 2026? While pondering that, the Web 2.0 cliche "the web is made of people" came to mind, a saying that perhaps derived from the 1973 dystopian movie Soylent Green. Some Friday musings from an ol' webhead just trying to keep it real... ricmac.org/2026/06/19/t...

Turns out websites have a future in the AI era after all. I talk to an e-commerce founder about why his team is building around the emerging #WebMCP open standard. agenticweb.news/nekuda-webmc...

The agentic web is moving from read and write... to read, write and execute! This week’s signals span agent payments, callable app actions, persistent cloud execution and portable organisational knowledge. agenticweb.news/agentic-web-...

The user interface is moving from pages into agents. MCP Apps, atomic brand kits and headless CMS infrastructure all point to the same shift: apps, brands and content becoming machine-readable components that agents can assemble for users. ricmac.org/2026/06/12/u...

My latest interview with agentic web builders is with Ido Salomon & Liad Yosef, about MCP Apps and the rise of software apps inside of AI assistants & agents. In particular, they're focused on the UI aspects — including now generative UI. agenticweb.news/mcp-apps/

New on Agentic Web News: The machine-readable web becomes a business problem In this week's market signals post, I connect Cloudflare, Microsoft Web IQ, atomic brand kits, Salesforce + Contentful, and The Economist’s ChatGPT app. agenticweb.news/agentic-web-...

Who owns that AI agent? I wrote about DNSid, a project from Innovation Labs / Identity Digital that wants to use DNS as an accountability layer for agents on the web. The agentic web needs identity — ideally open, shared infrastructure rather than platform control. agenticweb.news/who-owns-ai-...

"If I were building a website tomorrow, or building a SaaS app tomorrow, I would probably build it MCP-first, because that’s how agents increasingly want to consume this." A quote from my interview with Alex Salazar, CEO of Arcade — building middleware for agents. agenticweb.news/arcade-actio...

In this week's Agentic Web News market signals, I look at the economic layers now emerging in the agentic web: 📡 Agentic advertising enters its “wild west” phase 🛒 Amazon launches agentic shopping infra 🆔 DNS-AID points to the need for agent identity & discovery agenticweb.news/agentic-web-...

The open social web needs more horses.

"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. I also reflect on some of the negative consequences of agentic AI this week (tech layoffs, etc). ricmac.org/2026/05/29/a...

Testing the new @standard.site integration. ricmac.leaflet.pub/3mjwy6k77u22q I like how it makes it stand out as a publication. Great to see WordPress also supporting this, as well as the Atmosphere native apps like Leaflet. (Nb: you need to upgrade your Bluesky app to see the difference)

Readers, writers, publishers of the Atmosphere, exciting news: Bluesky shipped @standard.site integration! Posts and publications from Leaflet now render on the timeline with some *special sauce* — see it in this very post :) More in Lab Notes…including a new standard.site post block in Leaflet!

v1.122 is rolling out today, featuring a better way to discover and share articles, blog posts and newsletters across the Atmosphere via new, dynamic Standard.site link cards. 🧵

RunSignup, a web platform for race organizers, is deploying AI chatbots and building agentic infrastructure across its product. I spoke to founder Bob Bickel about how MCP, AI assistants, and conversational interfaces are reshaping SaaS. agenticweb.news/runsignup-ai...

My analysis of Google I/O: Google laid out a big, not always coherent vision for making the web more agent-ready. The strongest signals came from Chrome, while Gemini Spark and AI search raise questions. Also: could Parallel’s Index solve AI’s publisher economics? agenticweb.news/google-agent...

I’ve just launched Agentic Web News: signals, interviews and analysis on the next phase of the web. I'm using the Ghost platform for this; am hoping to eventually turn this into a subscription newsletter. Check it out if you're intrigued about this new era of the web. agenticweb.news/welcome-to-a...

The agentic web is becoming a business issue. As AI agents begin to discover, interpret and act on websites, businesses need to rethink what their websites are for. My new post looks at what this means for business leaders, product teams, publishers and developers. ricmac.org/2026/05/13/w...

What is the agentic web? I’ve published a new post defining the term and placing it in historical context: Read web → Read/write web → Platform web → Agentic web The key point: websites aren’t disappearing. Indeed, I'd argue their role is expanding. ricmac.org/2026/05/08/w...

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". ricmac.org/2026/05/05/a... #AgenticWeb

Ha, @ernie.tedium.co also mentioned this in a comment, but this is *so* GeoCities :) Which is a good thing, in my book — visual creativity on the web is to be encouraged, in a world of bland social media / Medium / etc designs. Dare I say, maybe even a bit of early MySpace anarchy?

great vision / examples for how "atmospheric websites" can better serve organizers — from global event listings, to shared collections of resources, to interoperable social graphs… exciting space here to explore collaboratively!

Pssssst! Are you making an atmosphere landing page and/or refactoring your sign up because of recent ✨discourse✨? I got what you need. *Opens trench coat to reveal convenient, flattened, normalized svg atmosphere logos in color and b&w* www.figma.com/community/fi... tangled.org/cozylittle.h...

New post -> Agentic web patterns: what Web 2.0 taught me I connect a story from my early Web 2.0 days — working on "design patterns for Web 2.0" — with the emerging patterns I’m now seeing for AI on websites. ricmac.org/2026/04/28/a...

I’ve been exploring how AI is changing websites over the past few months — both writing about it and building a few things. I’m now working as an agentic web consultant, and I’ve just produced a 36-page playbook on how to add AI to a website. You can request it here: ricmac.org/agentic-web-...

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.

🎵 A mosquito Our reginos Yeah!

Sorry, no leaflets today because of the reginos.

Thoughts on 'informal blogging' by doing an audio note in the Day One app. Also: why I've put my 'formal blog' Cybercultural on pause.

Cool slice of blogging history, great to see Leaflet mentioned as part of this new open social ecosystem echoing some of the blogosphere's early days (indeed the atmosphere's still early too!) thanks @ricmac.org I also like this idea for a sidebar / *leafroll* :)

There's a lot in Leaflet that reminds me of Radio Userland in 2003. Including that its informal blogging format (or "EZ blogging" as @pfrazee.com calls it) encourages a different kind of open social participation. Remember when we used to think through topics by blogging them? #BringBackBlogging

I started a @semble.so, which is "a social knowledge network for research built on the AT Protocol." My first collection is about Internet History, and I've made it open so anyone can add to it: semble.so/profile/ricm...

“The open web […] didn't win because the tools were better. It won because a critical mass of people decided that the alternative, a handful of AOL-style walled gardens choosing what everyone saw, was not the future they wanted. Then they built their way out of it.” timtrautmann.com/blog/the-ner...

That annoying question that endures…

Hey I’m back blogging again! And it’s because I’m a shit microblogger. But also because I am looking for that 2003 RWW feeling again. Can I keep this going? I don’t want to pressure myself, but then blogging in 2003 was an informal, experimental thing. That’s what I would like to do with Leaflet.

I’ve been exploring how AI systems are starting to act as an interface to the web. To help organizations navigate this shift, I’ve developed an Agentic Web Audit — a hands-on, non-automated assessment of how AI systems access, understand, and interact with your site. ricmac.org/agentic-web-...

I've updated my handle to @ricmac.org, since my personal website has become the center of my online existence again. Previously I had a handle connected to my internet history website, Cybercultural — but that's currently on pause while I focus all my energies on earning an income post-TNS.

Checking out the ATmosphereConf 2026 highlights. Wow there are a lot of videos! I'm especially curious to watch ones about "atmospheric websites" and blogging on AT Protocol. Didn't immediately see any videos about @standard.site, etc — anyone have pointers? www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBYN...

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. ricmac.org/2026/04/07/t...

It’s 20 years since Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet. That same day, 21 March 2006, I posted “microcontent design” on ReadWriteWeb. This was the feeds world web geeks like me wanted to become a reality: web standards-based feeds, using RSS/Atom, microformats, etc. web.archive.org/web/20060508...

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. I think local AI has huge implications for the #OpenWeb. ricmac.org/2026/03/19/a... #WebAI

What is this stage of perimenopause where old songs bounce off me, but seeing a 21-year-old website can make me weep for a better time…?

I experimented with WebMCP on my personal website, exposing two tools an AI assistant can call directly from the browser: searching an article and subscribing to my newsletter. It’s a small prototype, but it hints at how websites are fast becoming AI-interactive surfaces. ricmac.org/2026/03/11/w...

tenth-muse.com in 2006 https://web.archive.org/web/20060703210129if_/http://tenth-muse.com

As part of my Web AI explorations, I built an AI chatbot for my personal website called Ask Ricmac. Under the hood, it runs on a Cloudflare Workers backend that uses Vectorize, D1 and Workers AI. During development, I also used the WordPress MCP Adapter and Claude Desktop. ricmac.org/2026/03/06/b...

♛ 1995: From Batman Forever’s cinematic design to HTML tables. History lesson and appreciation by @ricmac.cybercultural.com. cybercultural.com/p/1995-web-d... #WebDesign #WebDesignHistory #DesignHistory #WarnerBros #cinema #movies #films #marketing #promotions

In the latest post in my web design history series, I look at Batman Forever, an influential 1995 website by @zeldman.bsky.social and friends. Also, later in the year HTML tables arrive, along with early visual design tools FrontPage & PageMill. cybercultural.com/p/1995-web-d... #WebDesignHistory

Yowzers.

While I figure out what’s next in my career, I resolved to dive into a technology stack I’ve been deeply interested in for a while: Web AI. Only this time not just writing about these technologies, but building apps with them too. ricmac.org/2026/02/26/w... #WebAI

Personal update: after nearly 6 years at The New Stack, my role has come to an end as part of a broader round of redundancies. I’m now exploring ideas at the intersection of AI and web systems, particularly how AI is reshaping the architecture and future of the open web. I welcome conversations.