Motherboard: Meet the Self-Hosters, Taking Back the Internet One Server at a Time. “Through a growing movement of dedicated hobbyists known as self-hosters, the dream of a decentralized internet lives on at a time when surveillance, censorship, and increasing scrutiny of Big Tech has created widespread mistrust in large internet platforms.”
Slate: How Wikipedia Grew Up With the War on Terror. “On Sept. 4, 2001, the MIT Technology Review published an article titled ‘Free the Encyclopedias!’ introducing Wikipedia, the free web-based encyclopedia. The article described Wikipedia, which had started in January of that year, as ‘intellectual anarchy extruded into encyclopedia form’ and proclaimed that Wikipedia ‘will probably never dethrone Britannica.’ One week after the MIT Technology Review story, the Wikipedia community responded to the spectacular tragedy of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by kicking into encyclopedia-editing overdrive.”
CNET: Yahoo has a new owner, again. “Apollo Global Management on Wednesday said it had completed its acquisition of Yahoo, formerly part of Verizon Media. The private equity firm in May agreed to acquire Verizon’s media group — which included brands such as Yahoo and AOL, as well as ad tech and media platform businesses — for $5 billion.”
Investopedia: Google’s Incredible YouTube Purchase 15 Years Later. “Nearly 15 years ago, Alphabet Inc.’s (GOOGL, GOOG) Google purchased YouTube for the hefty sum of $1.65 billion. The actual date the news hit was Oct. 9, 2006. That may seem like a small sum for the behemoth that YouTube is today. But back then, the video site had been around for less than two years—even if it was growing like a weed.”
ZDNet: Facebook is the AOL of 2021. “The 1990s had a word for being trapped inside a manipulative notion of human contact: AOL. Facebook and its ilk are the rebirth of that limited vision.”
Mashable: 9 websites that will bring you back to the old internet. “The internet has been around for long enough — and shifted so drastically in that time — that it’s really easy to get nostalgic for past versions of online life. I mean, remember things like Xanga or the old-school AOL homepage? Those sites are pretty much gone — at least how you knew them. But there remain a few sports for old school online life. That in mind, if you’re ever in the mood for some internet-based nostalgia, we’ve got you covered. We rounded up 9 websites that’ll bring you back to the old internet.”Mashable: 9 websites that will bring you back to the old internet. “The internet has been around for long enough — and shifted so drastically in that time — that it’s really easy to get nostalgic for past versions of online life. I mean, […]
The Register: WEB@30: The Register pokes around historical hardware of the WWW . “Double-u, double-u, double-u. ‘The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it’s short for,’ as the great Douglas Adams once said. But for those who fancy eyeballing exhibits from acoustic couplers and coffee-cams to dot-matrix printers and cartoon badgers in the venerable author’s home town, WEB@30 Cambridge is well worth a look.”
ZDNet: How Internet Explorer really beat Netscape . “Here’s the real reason why IE beat Netscape: Microsoft strong-armed PC vendors into putting the new operating system and its browser on all their PCs. The goal was not so much to kill off other PC operating system vendors. There wasn’t any real competition in the mid-90s. The goal was to destroy Netscape.”
The Next Web: A brief history of YikYak — the anon platform making its return. “Yik Yak is back! If you don’t know what it is, I don’t blame you. It was an anonymous gossip platform that had some success, but after running into moderation problems and failing to deal with problematic content, it was shut down in 2017. The company announced on Twitter that it’s making a comeback with an iOS app. But before we get into that, let’s take a look at the brief history of the social network.”
Washington Post: He predicted the dark side of the Internet 30 years ago. Why did no one listen?. “In 1994 — before most Americans had an email address or Internet access or even a personal computer — Philip Agre foresaw that computers would one day facilitate the mass collection of data on everything in society. That process would change and simplify human behavior, wrote the then-UCLA humanities professor. And because that data would be collected not by a single, powerful ‘big brother’ government but by lots of entities for lots of different purposes, he predicted that people would willingly part with massive amounts of information about their most personal fears and desires.”
ZDNet: Say hello to the early days of web browsers. “Before Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Edge, there were Mosaic, Cello, and Viola.” A slideshow, but a – well, nostalgic for me. Might be ancient history for you.
Google Blog: Best Trends forever: 15 years of Google Trends. “What were you doing in 2006? Maybe you were going through your emo phase. Maybe you were loving low rise jeans. Maybe you were mourning Pluto’s (temporary) demotion from planet to dwarf planet. Maybe you were checking out these trends — and plenty of others — on Google Trends, which went live in the summer of 2006. Though the tool’s data goes back to 2004, it became available two years later. This summer, Google Trends turns 15, so we thought it would be the perfect time to look back on trends of yesteryear and compare what people were searching for back in 2006 to today.”
SEO Roundtable: Yahoo Sign Taken Down At Sunnyvale Headquarters. “This is sad, here is a photo from Twitter of the Yahoo sign in front of the Yahoo Sunnyvale, California headquarters, being taken down. You can see tons of legacy photos of this iconic sign on Shutterfly or on Google.”
How-To Geek: The First Website: How the Web Looked 30 Years Ago. “Titled ‘World Wide Web,’ the world’s first public website served as a bare-bones introduction to the concept of the web itself for those outside of CERN who might have been interested in the technology. Amazingly, CERN still hosts a copy of the site that you can view in your modern browser, which reportedly dates to some time in 1992. Sadly, though, the original December 1990 version is lost to history.”
