Internet history and its impact on our culture.
Batman Forever website, launched May 1995. If 1994 was when the Web became a publishing medium , then 1995 was when the Web truly marked itself as a unique expressive medium. The Web became a place — a destination — rather than a mere repository for documents. In previous posts , we've seen how web design elements were limited in the early years of the Web. In 1993, Jennifer Niederst Robbins used…
Cool Site of the Day; screenshot via Megan Sapnar Ankerson . On August 10, 1994, a 33-year old web enthusiast named Glenn Davis posted the following announcement to a UseNet mailing list: "Need a daily web fix of something new? Try The Cool Site of the Day. Every night at midnite the Cool Site of the Day gets set to point at a new Cool Site. You'll never know what's there until you take the link…
Netscape's browser project was codenamed Mozilla during 1994; via Macintosh Garden . If web design is not yet a profession in 1993 because of the technical limitations of HTML and early browsers, then 1994 is the year web authors start asking the question: why can't we control formatting and presentation? At this point, the leading browser vendors — first Mosaic and then Netscape — see layout as…
Global Network Navigator (GNN); via Ford & Mason Ltd . If Adam Curry's MTV.com in 1993 was a text-based index of music reviews and industry gossip — basically the same format as a Gopher site or FTP server — then Global Network Navigator (GNN) aimed to be something a little more high-minded. It aspired to be an "online magazine" on the World Wide Web. Accordingly, it needed a designer to create…
MTV VJ Adam Curry in 1993, the year he took to the Web with MTV.com. Photo via WikiMedia . Any history of web design has to begin with the first graphical web browser to go mainstream: Mosaic, later to be renamed Netscape Navigator. At the beginning of 1993, college student Marc Andreessen wrote a message to the WWW-Talk mailing list calling for volunteers to test a new GUI (graphical user…
Web design books; by Phillip Chee on Flickr , February 2010. Welcome to season 5 of Cybercultural, which will be a history of web design from 1993 till 2012. That's twenty years of web design, going from the grey HTML webpages of 1993 through to the colourful, mobile-centric (yet responsive) designs of 2012. This history of web design will cover two eras of the internet: dot-com and Web 2.0. I…
DavidBowie.com, January 8, 2013 . After 2004, the rise of the social web — and especially platforms like MySpace and Facebook — made niche social networks like BowieNet less relevant in the culture. This shift coincided with the slow decline of BowieNet itself. The portal and ISP had launched in 1998 and had two major redesigns (in 2000 and 2003 ), but when David Bowie suffered a heart attack…
Pitchfork's 2003 review of MP3 blogger favorite, The Rapture. Season 4 of Cybercultural has been focused on the rise of digital culture from 1994 through to 2003, a period that encompasses the beginning of the web, moves through the dot-com boom and bust, and ends the year before Web 2.0 emerges. During this season, I've written a lot about how both online music and blogging evolved from 1994-2003…
Flash at full volume: Jamiroquai’s website in 2003 . By 2003, the internet had weathered the worst of the dot-com crash and developers and entrepreneurs were beginning to come out of hibernation. While it would take another year for Silicon Valley to start inflating another bubble — this one would be named "Web 2.0" — there was a renewed sense of optimism. Blogging and RSS moved into the…
Browsing the indie web is like browsing a record store; you'll be surprised at the treasures you find. Photo by Josué Sánchez . I've always liked doing annual wrapup posts, from the Best Web 2.0 Companies on ReadWriteWeb during the 2000s through to the " What the Internet Was Like in {Year} " articles on Cybercultural today. So as we approach the end of 2025, I thought I'd turn my attention to the…
The release of NetNewsWire 1.0 in February 2003 , one of the first popular RSS Readers. So far in my history of blogging and RSS, we've seen how weblogs emerged in 1999 as a new form of personal journal, began to link to each other in 2000 via blogrolls, turned serious in 2001 with "warblogs," and then became an interconnected ecosystem called the blogosphere in 2002 . In 2003, blogging continued…
BowieNet version 3 . Screenshot circa September 2003, via Web Design Museum . At the end of July 2003, in the lead-up to the release of David Bowie's latest album, Reality , BowieNet teased members with a promotional splash page and a new feature called the “Reality Jukebox.” The latter turned out to be a Flash page featuring multimedia promotions for the new album: “Firstly there are 90-second…
MySpace in September 2003 , the month after its launch. The term “digital native” was coined in 2001 by writer and teacher Marc Prensky, who wrote that “our students today are all 'native speakers' of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.” The rest of us are “digital immigrants,” which Prensky (who was in his mid-50s) defined as “not born into the digital world but have,…
KaZaA , one of many P2P file sharing services in 2002. In June 2002, Pew Research Center released a report on broadband uptake . It stated that 21% of all Internet users in America — 24 million adults — now had broadband in the home, up from just 6% two years ago. Of course, broadband penetration would continue to trend upward over the coming years. But even in 2002, Pew claimed that the internet…
Movable Type blog entry template, 2002; via Wayback Machine . In my history of blogging so far, we've seen how weblogs emerged in 1999 as a new form of personal journal, began to link to each other in 2000 via blogrolls, and then turned serious in 2001 with "warblogs." During those early years of the form, I was aware of certain weblogs but I hadn't yet signed up for an account at Blogger or…
Apple iPod generation 2 webpage, Aug-Sep 2002; via Wayback Machine . After the iPod’s launch in October 2001 — “1,000 songs in your pocket" — Apple sold 125,000 units of the new device by the end of the year. In March 2002, Apple introduced a version with 10GB of storage (approximately 2,000 songs). But it wasn’t until August 2002, with the second generation iPod , that the real growth began. That…
Last.fm circa 2003; via Last.fm Flickr account . What we now know as the “social web” — or Web 2.0 — didn’t arrive until around 2004 . But the first inklings of it were emerging a couple of years before. As usual, music was the harbinger. Last.fm was founded in 2002 by a group of four Austrian and German students from Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication in London. It was fashioned as…
Apple iTunes, the Rip Mix Burn advert, 2001; via YouTube (video embedded below). The year 2001 began with optimism — in January, Wikipedia debuted and Apple launched iTunes. But by year’s end the mood had shifted. The dot-com crash had drained Silicon Valley’s exuberance, Napster was being dismantled in court, and the new wave of post-9/11 “warblogs” made the internet feel solemn and overly…
Blogdex , a system launched in 2001 to track weblogs. At the beginning of 2001, most popular weblogs were a combination of personal journal and linkblog — a format encouraged by early blogging tools like Blogger, LiveJournal and Diaryland. But by the end of the year, blogging had become a real-time reporting tool too; most notably in the form of the “warblogs” that became popular after 9/11, like…
Internet Archive website after the launch of Wayback Machine in October 2001. If the future is going to devolve into chaos, then the present ought to be preserved somehow, online. That was part of the thinking behind the Wayback Machine, a public archive of web pages that was launched on October 24, 2001, at a library at the University of California at Berkeley. At the event, Internet Archive…