The web’s history is always being written, and not just by me. So each month I like to go through and share bits of research and great posts that continue to explore the heart and history of the web. It’s my sites own personal weblog. Bringing Back the Indie Web With the many, ma … | Continue reading
There’s this scene in the second season of The Crown (if you watch enough old movies, you’ll see the same kind of thing). The scene depicts Princess Margaret, away from England and distraught after hearing news of a former love, as she attempts to get in contact with her sister, … | Continue reading
TL;DR I’m changing things up a bit. I’ll still be sharing history, but that history will look a bit different, and come to you little less frequently than every week. First one goes out next week. Also, a redesign! Thirty years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee handed his employers at C … | Continue reading
In the summer of 2001, Paul Bucheit sent a website he was working on to his friends and colleagues. The site was an application where users could search through thousands of emails at a time and get back relevant results. Bucheit had finished the software in a single day, so it w … | Continue reading
When Ory Okolloh returned to her hometown in Kenya to vote in the 2007 presidential election, she arrived with hope for the future of her country. She was an activist and a blogger, and had run the site Kenyan Pundit since 2005. She had also helped build tools to increase governm … | Continue reading
By Emerson Dameron In the late ‘90s, tiny magazines were having a moment. The popularity of underground punk and indie rock, together with the wide circulation of the review zine Factsheet Five, gave rise to zines, a subculture of shameless self-expression that was thriving aroun … | Continue reading
By 2000, Salon had made quite the name for itself with their quick, pithy headlines and stories that posted all hours of the day, around the clock. Their coverage of President Clinton’s impeachment trial was particularly exhaustive, with up to the minute updates multiple times a … | Continue reading
I like to cap off each month with a few links I’ve found from my research or around the web. Here’s some cool links I found this month. The Other Art History: The Forgotten Cyberfeminists of ’90s Net Art Loney Abrams takes us back to the early ’90’s, when the ubiquity and accessi … | Continue reading
The phrase “single-page application” has come, over the years, to mean both a particular type of website and a web development paradigm. A website could be considered a single-page application (SPA) when it is built to resemble a desktop application more than a traditional static … | Continue reading
In 1995, Dr. Cynthia Waddell published a web design accessibility standard for the City of San Jose’s Office of Equality Assurance. It included a comprehensive and concise list of specifications for designers of the city’s website to strictly adhere to. The list included, among m … | Continue reading
The web has been… unpredictable. We usually think it will go one way, only to see it go another. Case in point. There were plenty that believed major media organizations would find their place on the web medium. What we didn’t expect so much was this totally unpredictable outgrow … | Continue reading
danah boyd has studied social implications of our digital lives since the very beginning of her research career. In the mid 2000’s, she was working towards a Ph.D at the UC Berkley School of Information, focusing specifically on the role that social media was affecting a new gene … | Continue reading
Benjamin Sun and Omar Wasow met for the first time in 1999. They had both recently struck out on the web as passionate early adopters. Wasow had just recently made a shift from running a pre-web Internet provider called New York Online to developing and designing websites for mag … | Continue reading
The Internet does not begin and end with the World Wide Web. Sometimes, if we want to truly understand how the web developed, we need to step back to a world where it never existed at all. The Internet invigorated us with a new kind of spirit; it created a new way of seeing, feel … | Continue reading
Back in the earliest days of the web, some blogs used to have a blogroll. Somewhere on their site, usually in the sidebar, they’d list out a few links from their favorite blogs in no particular order. Before search and social media, the blogroll was key to discovery on the web an … | Continue reading
Jennifer Robbins is proud to count herself among the web’s first designers. Literal days after the World Wide Web entered into commercial use in May of 1993, Robbins designed, developed and helped launch Global Network Navigator (GNN), a collection of the web’s best links on one … | Continue reading
On August 7, 2010 Wired declared that the World Wide Web was dead. The cover that graced the newstands that month featured a bold orange background splash with large black text words that simply read “The Web is Dead” (pictured above). The release was provocative and timely, just … | Continue reading
The web has always belonged to all of us. That is to say its protocols and underlying technology are products of the public domain and can be used by everyone, everywhere. By design, and with prescribed purpose, the web is open. Some of the first voyagers on the web’s shifting sh … | Continue reading
Back in the earliest days of the web, some blogs used to have a blogroll. Somewhere on their site, usually in the sidebar, they’d list out a few links from their favorite blogs in no particular order. Before search and social media, the blogroll was key to discovery on the web an … | Continue reading
In the beginning, the web had no memory. When you followed a link to a new page, everything you did on the last page was erased. There was a fresh start with every click. It was Netscape that gave the web a memory. Pretty early on, actually, when they realized there were a few is … | Continue reading
Back in the earliest days of the web, some blogs used to have a blogroll. Somewhere on their site, usually in the sidebar, they’d list out a few links from their favorite blogs in no particular order. Before search and social media, the blogroll was key to discovery on the web an … | Continue reading
The story of how responsive images made its way into the browser doubles as an inside look at the standards making process itself. For some of us on the web, myself counted among them, it was our very first look behind the curtain. Web standards, the rules of CSS and HTML and Jav … | Continue reading
The web community has, for the most part, been a spectacularly open place. As such, a lot of the best development techniques happen right out in the open, on blogs and in forums, evolving as they’re passed around and improved. I thought it might be fun (and fascinating) to actual … | Continue reading
Salon got its start when David Talbot left the San Francisco Examiner in early 1995, taking with him a few key staff members and editors to work on a new online experiment. Talbot had become restless at the Examiner and wanted to start something new, something that would reinvigo … | Continue reading
If you happened to live in Santa Cruz in 1994 you could sit down at your computer, open up your favorite browser, and then go ahead and order a pizza online. You could do all of this on PizzaNet, owned and operated by Pizza Hut. PizzaNet was an experiment that launched in the ear … | Continue reading
Back in the earlier days of the web, some blogs used to have a blogroll. Somewhere on their site, usually in the sidebar, they’d list out a few links from their favorite blogs in no particular order. Before search and social media, the blogroll was key to discovery on the web and … | Continue reading
If you don’t know much about the Opera browser, that’s probably because their market share in the United States has never been particularly high (right now, it stands at around 1.5%). Opera’s competitive advantage is that they deal with the real world. They solve problems that ot … | Continue reading
NCSA Mosaic was one of the first cross-platform web browsers on the market. It was met with a kind of awe. Within months of its release in the summer of ’93, Mosaic had changed the way people thought not only of browsers, but of the World Wide Web in general. Gary Wolfe wrote in … | Continue reading
It’s been over seventeen years since the world ended. Or, rather, it was supposed to be The End of the World as We Know It. If that sounds like a big deal that’s because, at the time, it truly was. This is how things were supposed to go down. On January 1, 2000 at the … | Continue reading
Jessica Livingston has a passion for the web’s future. It’s what lead her, in March of 2005, to quit her day job and help start up a new kind of investment firm called Y Combinator. Livingston had been a director at another VC firm, but she wanted to do things a bit differently w … | Continue reading
If you work on the web, you know that with software, things don’t always go right the first time. The web is this massive, global community tinkering with loosely connected technologies to piece together websites that, with any luck, work well together. These tools and technologi … | Continue reading
While looking into the rather storied history of Internet Cafe’s, I found myself following a kind of tangential story about cafe’s that opened up in East Asia. As it turns out, they took an entirely different form there. One of the first Internet Cafe’s, named simply Electronic C … | Continue reading
In the mid-90’s, Aliza Sherman moved to New York City. She had been bouncing around for a while in the music industry, working with artists like Tracy Chapman, Elvis Costello, and Metallica. In New York, Sherman hoped to settle down a bit and explore her newest passion: working w … | Continue reading
I’ve been digging into the history of search engines and centralized platforms lately. Mostly my goal has been to uncover what happened on the web to make privacy a commodity that is less than sacred, and intensive advertising the dominant business model. It’s easy to think that … | Continue reading
It started with a simple manifesto. A manifesto posted online with 37 guiding principles, small phrases showcasing big ideas like “We See People” and “Not Full Service” and “We Don’t Throw Curves.” The website was a list of rules for a web design agency to follow, created by Jaso … | Continue reading
”When you go to the Internet and you read about Judaism, you go straight to the intellect and the stereotypes fall away.” – Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Kazen Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Kazen wanted to spread the message of Judaism to the world. He was, after all, a member of the Orthodox Jewi … | Continue reading
How many websites are there? That’s not an easy question to answer. The web is, by its very nature, decentralized and global and super difficult to properly account for. A feature that we’re more and more finding is both a blessing and a curse. Best estimate for that number right … | Continue reading
Neopets was a massively successful and inclusive digital world, but I think people focus far too much on its advertising model. There’s so much more to the site. The site spawned its own unique economic simulacrum, had a tenuous connection to Scientology, a constantly shifting de … | Continue reading
Before the web, Gopher offered a way to connect to the Internet and share documents. And if things had gone a little differently, it might even be what we use to surf information today. The post What the Web Could Have Been appeared first on The History of the Web. | Continue reading
Without hypertext, there would be no World Wide Web. But its name and conception predate the web's creation by decades. The post A Brief History of Hypertext appeared first on The History of the Web. | Continue reading