MarketWatch: Wikipedia turns 20 years old today — the free encyclopedia gets more traffic than Netflix. “Wikipedia was launched on Jan. 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger as an English-language encyclopedia, according to — aptly — Wikipedia. Since then, the website has become every undergrad’s first stop when embarking on a research paper, […]
Red Hat: A brief history of network connectivity: Connected mainframes. “The appearance of the modern data center was not a grand reveal. Rather, it resulted from the evolution and convergence of two technologies that emerged out of the early 1980s. The first is the personal computer. The other is ubiquitous networking. Without either, the modern […]
Vulture: Clubhouse Is Dangerously Close to Becoming Our New Internet Wasteland. “Fear of missing out went digital in 2020, and there’s no better illustration of this than nights spent over the past month and a half on Clubhouse, the (currently) invite-only voice-chat app now drawing celebrities, professionals, and onlookers in the know out of seclusion […]
The Week: How to bring back the old internet. “People who grew up with the internet of the 1990s probably remember forums — those clunky, lo-fi spaces where people came together to argue about cars, cycling, video games, cooking, or a million other topics. They had their problems, but in retrospect the internet of those […]
Ars Technica: Stroll down memory lane with this 1996 instructional video on How To Internet. “The Internet Archive’s extensive library is a veritable treasure trove of digital content, including media from now-defunct formats like VHS, with the goal of preserving our cultural heritage. Case in point: a 1996 video, Everything You Need To Know About… […]
Nylon: An Oral History Of The Mid-2000s Scene Queens. “Myspace was the creation of a mysterious man known simply as Tom, but by then, it was clear who really ruled the site. This was the era when the Scene Queens were at the top of the world — or, at least, at the top of […]
Oregon Historical Society: Beached Whale Blow-Up: Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Florence Exploding Whale. “On the morning of November 12, 1970, KATU news directors asked reporter Paul Linnman and cameraman Doug Brazil to cover an unusual story taking place on the Oregon coast. A 45-foot sperm whale had washed up on the beach near […]
New York Times: How 2020 Changed the Internet. “In this long (and still ongoing) election season in America, there are two things I have learned about the internet companies through which many of us experience the world. First, Facebook, Google and the rest have reluctantly embraced their role as our gatekeepers to information, and there’s […]
99% Invisible: The Lost Cities of Geo. “Because David [Bohnett] ran an internet company, his business depended on users having some grasp of what the internet was. So it was his challenge to get people comfortable on the web. And one day in 1994, it just came to him. His hosting site didn’t need a […]
Art in America: Experimental Art Unlimited. “In 1996, several years before the appearance of either Discogs (launched November 2000) or Wikipedia (launched January 2001), New York artist-turned-writer Kenneth Goldsmith created UbuWeb, an online archive of avant-garde art and literature, historic and contemporary, largely focusing on time-based mediums such as film, video, and audio (the last […]
ZDNet: Yahoo Groups to shut down for good on December 15, 2020. “Yahoo Groups, one of the last vestiges of the old Yahoo web properties, will shut down on December 15, 2020, when Verizon plans to take the groups.yahoo.com website offline for good.” Thanks to Lucas L. for the heads-up.
The Next Web: From Yahoo! Pipes to Zapier: A brief history of web app automation. “In 2020, just about everyone has used — or at least heard of — apps like Zapier, IFTTT, and Integromat, or at least used built-in automation tools and workflow builders inside apps like Slack. For many businesses, automation is a […]
Mashable: What Apple, Google, and Amazon’s websites looked like in 1999. “The year was 1999: Cher’s ‘Believe’ was blasting on pop radio stations, Bill Clinton was impeached, Jar Jar Binks hit the Big Screen, and the beep, beep, static of dial-up internet echoed in family rooms across the globe. The World Wide Web was still […]
Mashable: One man’s frustrating journey to recovering his Myspace. “I’m not sure what triggered my journey. A nagging nostalgia, I suppose. Affection for an internet long gone. A part of my life I hardly remember. A certain bored curiosity that comes with life in quarantine. I wanted to access my old Myspace.”
iDrop News: Looking Back on Ping, Apple’s Failed Social Media Platform. “When a new Apple product or service is announced, most everyone assumes it will be a success. This month, ten years ago, Apple’s first-ever social network, Ping, was released to the public. However, Ping wasn’t the huge success Apple and many others were betting […]