Blogger, soon after its launch in August 1999.| Cybercultural: Internet History
Napster launched in May 1999 and soon there were millions of pirated songs online. Not even David Bowie, who released an album via digital download that year, could foresee Napster's future influence.| Cybercultural
Second Life founder Philip Rosedale demonstrating "the rig," a 1999 prototype virtual reality kit that would eventually lead to the founding of Second Life. Via YouTube.| Cybercultural: Internet History
Continuing his exploration of virtual personas, in 1999 David Bowie played two 3D characters in a game called 'Omikron: The Nomad Soul'. The songs he contributed were later added to his album, Hours.| Cybercultural
BowieWorld, via mutant ratz on YouTube.| Cybercultural: Internet History
Like Morpheus in The Matrix, Google gave web users a stark choice in 1999: take the red pill and experience a new world of search quality, or choose the blue pill and stick with the bloated world of portal search.| Cybercultural
Borrowing a concept from podcasting, I'm introducing 'seasons' of content on Cybercultural. From season 1 in 2019, when I began this as a newsletter, to the current season 4 focused on dot-com.| Cybercultural
It's 1998, the middle of the dot-com boom. Portals are advertising on TV, web developers are fighting browser companies, Microsoft and Amazon are gaining power, and Netscape is going open source.| Cybercultural
Google makes the transition from Stanford project to company over 1998, but it is portals like Yahoo! and portal-wannabes like AltaVista that feature in Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Watch that year.| Cybercultural
At the start of 1998, CDnow and Music Boulevard were the leading online CD shops. Then in June, Amazon branched out from books and began to sell music on its fast growing e-commerce website.| Cybercultural
BowieNet homepage on launch; via Wayback Machine.| Cybercultural
Excite portal, July 1998.| Cybercultural
In October, the Netscape vs. Microsoft rivalry reached fever pitch when Netscape employees defaced an Internet Explorer logo that had been dumped on its lawn by Microsofties.| Cybercultural
Decaf or Java — which version of MTV's website should you choose?| Cybercultural
U2 promoting their 1997 album 'Pop' with a VDOLive and RealVideo website; June 1997 screenshot via Wayback Machine.| Cybercultural
Duran Duran promoting their 1997 online single, Electric Barbarella; image via a fan site.| Cybercultural
An image from the Internet 1996 World Exposition book; via Internet Archive.| Cybercultural
Rocktropolis, a mid-1990s online music website.| Cybercultural
David Bowie's first website, 1995; via leontakesusoutside.com.| Cybercultural
Jeff Bezos showing off his new website Amazon.com, September 1995; via Seattle Times.| Cybercultural
"I am part of the Rebel Alliance #FediverseForFreedom"; image by Andy Piper via Mastodon.| Cybercultural
Cyberculture pioneer Alice Mary Hilton; background image: Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway (1995).| Cybercultural
Keanu Reeves as Johnny Mnemonic in the 1995 movie.| Cybercultural
Beverley Hills Internet in 1995, before being renamed GeoCities.| Cybercultural
Netscape's mascot, Mozilla, in 1994; artist: Dave Titus.| Cybercultural
Tagged "Lana Del Rey" in Tumblr, November 2012; screenshot via Wayback Machine.| Cybercultural
Netscape browser, 1994; screenshot via YouTube.| Cybercultural
IUMA's Jeff Patterson and Rob Lord; photo via Good Times.| Cybercultural
Gangnam Style, the most popular YouTube video of 2012.| Cybercultural
Lana Del Rey in Video Games, uploaded to YouTube in May 2011.| Cybercultural
David Bowie on a computer in 1994; photo by Dave Allocca.| Cybercultural
Total Distortion CD-ROM, a "music video adventure game"; screenshot via Internet Archive.| Cybercultural
2011 was the year Facebook, the world’s leading social network, launched Timeline and introduced its algorithmic feed. These changes were partly influenced by a formidable new competitor: Google+.| Cybercultural
The first Web 2.0 Conference program and the author in early Web 2.0.| Cybercultural
Interim redesign for ReadWriteWeb in July 2012, before the domain name change.| Cybercultural
When I arrived in San Francisco on Saturday, December 3, I was hoping to close the deal with SAY Media by the end of the week. Sean and I would be in meetings with them from Monday to Wednesday, and I would fly back to New Zealand on Friday (I’d added Thursday just in case it was needed).| Cybercultural
SAY Media's Troy Young at the company's Create 2011 event; image via YouTube.| Cybercultural
2011 edition of the Web 2.0 Map; via Wayback Machine.| Cybercultural
Marshall and I reflecting on our ReadWriteWeb adventure at the Green Dragon pub, Portland, October 2011. Note: I'm not sure who took this photo, but I found it via Wayback Machine.| Cybercultural
ReadWriteWeb homepage, August 2011; image via Wayback Machine.| Cybercultural
Jason Calacanis and Abraham Hyatt at the 2WAY Summit; photo by Shashi Bellamkonda.| Cybercultural
What followed Web 2.0 was not Web 3.0 (or Web3 for that matter), but a degraded version of the internet. Maybe we should call it Web -1.0, but a more scatological term has taken hold instead: enshittification. It describes a period, roughly during the 2010s, when internet platform companies like Facebook, Twitter and Apple purposefully made their online products less user friendly, more difficult for developers to build on, and more prone to disrupting online publishers. Here are three examples:| Cybercultural
Digital Archaeology exhibit at Internet Week 2011; photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid.| Cybercultural
RWW management team, SXSW 2011; from left to right: Richard MacManus, Sean Ammirati, Marshall Kirkpatrick; photo by Shashi Bellamkonda.| Cybercultural
The internet in 2010 was when social media conquered the world, as people flocked to Facebook and Twitter to have their say. Much of this was driven by smartphone apps—not just from the established players, but by newer apps like Instagram (the first truly mobile-native photo sharing app) and the location-based social networking app Foursquare.| Cybercultural
Me being interviewed by Pelpina Trip from WebBeat.tv, SXSW 2011.| Cybercultural
Me posing next to the Xerox ParcPad from 1992, an ancestor of the iPad (which was released in 2010); photo on the right is from a group dinner in San Francisco, October 2010.| Cybercultural
Screenshot of ReadWriteWeb in September 2010. Note: this is from a rare full-page screenshot of classic RWW, so most of the other images in this post will feature other parts of that particular RWW page. You can view the full screen capture here (thanks charlene mcbride!)| Cybercultural
One year ago, I launched the serialization of my third book, a memoir entitled Bubble Blog: From Outsider to Insider in Silicon Valley's Web 2.0 Revolution. The book covers the years 2003-2012, the time in which I created ReadWriteWeb and built it into one of the top 10 blogs in the world (also syndicated on The New York Times for a few years). It’s both a personal memoir and an internet history of the Web 2.0 period. Since the launch last October, I’ve published 54 instalments — with t...| Cybercultural
ReadWriteWeb Twitter account, 31 August 2010.| Cybercultural
After my trips to New York and Portland, I flew back to San Francisco. I first attended the SemTech conference for the second year running. However, the most interesting event I went to that week was at Singularity University (SU), located at the NASA Ames Research Park near Mountain View.| Cybercultural
RWW's coworking day at Urban Grind café; clockwise from left-back: me, Alex Williams, Deane Rimerman, Audrey Watters, Marshall Kirkpatrick; photo by Abraham Hyatt.| Cybercultural
Me at our first NYC event, in June 2010. Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid.| Cybercultural
Today I completed a redesign of Cybercultural, including a new navigation structure and other changes related to an upgrade in my publishing system, Eleventy. I've upgraded from Eleventy version 2 to the latest 3.0 beta version, which required significant changes to my code. There’s also a bunch of new content on the site, since I decided to migrate my previous history website — Web Development History (WDH) — into Cybercultural.| Cybercultural
I think Sean was more excited to meet Fred Wilson than I was. As a wannabe VC, he was in awe of Fred and had tried (unsuccessfully) to interview him for the ReadWriteTalk podcast. I certainly knew about Fred and subscribed to his blog in Google Reader, but it felt like we lived in different neighborhoods of the blogosphere. We only rarely ran into each other, virtually speaking—one of us would comment on the other’s blog occasionally, but that was it.| Cybercultural
Team RWW at the Mobile Summit: Frederic, Chris, me, Marshall, Sean; photo via Chris Cameron.| Cybercultural
As internet culture continued to go mainstream over 2010, sometimes we at ReadWriteWeb got caught in the crosshairs. In February, our website was hilariously mistaken for the Facebook login page by thousands of people. We’d published a post entitled “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login.” It was a news analysis piece written by Mike Melanson about a partnership between Facebook and AOL. In typical RWW fashion, Mike had placed this news into the context of a broader, more important...| Cybercultural
A grainy iPhone photo I took of the bass player from Band of Skulls, when they played at Beauty Bar during SXSW Music 2010.| Cybercultural
I didn’t know much about the Paley Center for Media before I entered its impressive white stone building on Fifty-Second Street. But I knew it was about as “old media” as it could get in New York City—and I mean that in a good way. Formerly the Museum of Television and Radio, it was a cultural institution, but also one that aspired to lead “today’s media conversation” (as the website tagline put it). The organization’s bread and butter were television and radio—two mediums t...| Cybercultural
Oprah's first tweet, April 2009.| Cybercultural
Trey Ratcliff, Richard MacManus, Elyssa Pallai, and Sean Ammirati at The Oasis in Austin, TX. Photo by John Pozadzides.| Cybercultural
The two Tims at Web 2.0 Summit 2009: Berners-Lee and O'Reilly; photo via O'Reilly Conferences.| Cybercultural
The iPhone 3G and G1 (first Android device); October 2008.| Cybercultural
Team RWW visiting Facebook HQ in October 2009; from left to right: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Jolie O'Dell, Dana Oshiro, Bernard Lunn, me.| Cybercultural
Me at ReadWriteWeb's first in-person event.| Cybercultural
Mark Zuckerberg at a developer happy hour event at Facebook HQ, August 2007. Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid.| Cybercultural
In July 2009, we began planning our first RWW event. It would be in the “unconference” format, which had been suggested to us by Kaliya Hamlin, an expert on digital identity. The key aspect of an unconference was that it wasn’t based around presenters with PowerPoints talking to a mute audience; instead, a discussion facilitator would get everyone in the room talking. It was a very “read/write” concept, since the audience would be actively involved in the sessions. Obviously, this w...| Cybercultural
My FriendFeed account, August 2009.| Cybercultural
In June 2009, I interviewed the man who had made my entire career possible: Tim Berners-Lee.| Cybercultural
No smartphones, fat laptops. Welcome to the 2006 internet!| Cybercultural
Due largely to the SUL, RWW's Twitter a/c went from 13,300 followers in May 2009 to 256,000 by the end of June. By year's end, we'd matched Ashton Kutcher with over 1 million followers.| Cybercultural
In 2009, ReadWriteWeb was featured in the ia.net Web Trend Map, which "plots the Internet’s leading names and domains onto the Tokyo Metro map." Via Internet Archive.| Cybercultural
Team ReadWriteWeb during the 2008 Web 2.0 Summit; Sean Ammirati, Bernard Lunn, me, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Alex Iskold.| Cybercultural
The first big influx of people signed up to Twitter in March 2007, after it became a breakout app at the annual SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. But even web geeks didn't quite know what to make of Twitter. Was it an “IM/blogging hybrid," as I described it in June 2007, a month or so after I'd joined. Was it a "microblogging" app, like Tumblr, another trendy internet site to launch that year? Or was it "a weird experiment normally found in neuroscience labs," as a colleague of mine said?| Cybercultural
One of the first things I did after pulling out of the ZDE deal was to tell Marshall what had happened. I had penciled in a closing bonus and incentives over two years for him and the other writers, so he wouldn’t have been left out financially had the ZDE deal closed. But I apologized for not telling him about the potential sale until now. I’d been afraid he would walk, I said, given he was technically a part-time contractor during the negotiations. But now I wanted to focus on building ...| Cybercultural
By 2005, Web 2.0 — the Web as platform — was the driving trend of Silicon Valley. It was a new tech bubble, and that meant startup launches galore. YouTube and Reddit were just a couple of the future all-star web products launched in 2005. There were also plenty of acquisitions that year, including the leading social network of the day, MySpace, being purchased by NewsCorp.| Cybercultural
A frustrated looking blogger on 7 July 2008, a week before RWW withdraws from the ZDE deal. Also pictured: Puggy the pug dog.| Cybercultural
Tuesday’s financial discussions were with Kobi Levy and Jake Stein from Insight Partners, the private equity firm that was buying ReadWriteWeb on behalf of Ziff Davis Enterprise.| Cybercultural
2004, twenty years ago, was the year that Web 2.0 truly began. In February, Facebook was quietly launched in a Harvard dorm room. Meanwhile, across the border in Canada, a photo sharing site called Flickr was released. Then in April, Google launched one of the first web apps that worked just like a native app: Gmail. The technology behind it, a JavaScript technique that would later be termed "Ajax,” would come to define many of the web products that became popular over the coming years.| Cybercultural
The due-diligence meetings with Ziff Davis Enterprise would start at midday on Monday. But first, I had arranged to meet Bernard Lunn, a freelance ReadWriteWeb writer and now my business advisor, who was based somewhere in greater New York.| Cybercultural
NYC from above; photo taken by author in May 2008.| Cybercultural
Instead of the latest installment of my serialized Web 2.0 memoir, this week I want to talk about the experience of selling a tech blogging business — and the after-life this can have, which sometimes (maybe most of the time?) can be more hell than heaven.| Cybercultural
Early on Thursday morning, after a phone call with Bernard on the East Coast, I sent my email ultimatum to CMP/TechWeb. “I’ve given this a lot of thought over the past 12 hours or so,” I wrote, “and it really is time for me to make a decision.” I asked for “a firm, signed, LOI” [Letter of Intent] before 9:00 a.m. on Friday, or I would “need to withdraw from these negotiations.” I proposed a number equal to ZDE’s in their LOI, with half on closing and the other half on a ma...| Cybercultural
Mike Azzara from Ziff Davis Enterprise had arranged a dinner for three people—he’d be bringing along a new ZDE editor named Stephen Wellman, whom he’d just hired from (of course) CMP. The dinner reservation was at a restaurant called TWO, in the trendy SoMa district of San Francisco, apparently in the original 1922 headquarters of the San Francisco Newspaper Company. Perhaps this was why, as I would soon discover, it was popular with media people.| Cybercultural
On the opening morning of the Web 2.0 Expo, I met Marshall Kirkpatrick for the first time in the press room, on the third floor of the Moscone Center. He was a big-boned guy, a couple of inches taller than me, with brown hair and well-trimmed beard. He looked young, an impression further emphasized by the olive-green-and-white sweatshirt he wore over blue jeans and sneakers. As we shook hands, I noticed that his blue eyes looked nervous behind his small, red-rimmed rectangular glasses. But it...| Cybercultural
'Intro to RWW' slide from a March 2008 presentation.| Cybercultural
In early November 2007 Mike Arrington and his TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde approached me about participating in a new awards competition they’d come up with, “the Crunchies.” The idea (as far as I could tell) was to replicate the Webby Awards, which had been running since 1996. The Crunchies would focus specifically on Web 2.0 companies. TechCrunch would produce the show, with Read/WriteWeb, GigaOm, and VentureBeat as cohosts.| Cybercultural
The first sign of health problems came before I went to the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit. Late that September, I was traveling by car to Kaikoura, a scenic coastal town near the top of the South Island of New Zealand. My wife and six-year-old daughter were with me; we intended to spend a few nights there and then visit my nana in Blenheim on the way back. But during that car trip I felt unwell and was frequently stopping to urinate. After we arrived in Kaikoura, my wife and I began arguing—partly du...| Cybercultural
MySpace party during the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit; from left to right: Prashant Agarwal, me, Sean Ammirati; photo by Brian Solis.| Cybercultural
Stranger in a strange land; me at The Venetian, 28 April, 2007.| Cybercultural
In April 2007, I traveled back to San Francisco for the first Web 2.0 Expo, which was being pitched as a trade show. I arrived on Friday, April 13. I would be moderating a panel at the event, entitled “The New Hybrid Designer,” and I suggested the panelists meet to discuss what exactly a “hybrid designer” is supposed to be. We arranged to have dinner on Friday evening at an Indian restaurant called Chaat Café on Third Street. I brought along my Irish friend Fergus Burns, who had also...| Cybercultural
There had been rumors of a combined phone and iPod device coming from Apple, but what Steve Jobs announced at Macworld on January 9, 2007, blasted away all expectations. Using his trademark showmanship, Jobs calmly announced that Apple was “introducing three revolutionary products,” which he described as an iPod, a mobile phone, and an internet communicator. He repeated these three ingredients several times, slowly building the anticipation and eliciting whoops and anxious laughter from t...| Cybercultural
On Friday I made my way from San Francisco to the TechCrunch ranch in Atherton, about forty-five minutes south down the 101. Mike was as busy as usual. I brought up the RWW Research idea that I’d chatted to my friend Fergus about, but he was too absorbed in his own expansion plans to care. Simply put, he was on a different level now. He was at the epicenter of the Silicon Valley startup scene, rather than skirting the periphery like me. A recent Wall Street Journal article had called Mike ...| Cybercultural
In early November I was back in Silicon Valley to attend the annual Web 2.0 Conference, now renamed Web 2.0 Summit, and with the theme of “Disruption & Opportunity.” The name change was because the organizers, O’Reilly Media and John Battelle, were expanding and had added a companion trade show, Web 2.0 Expo, that was to launch the following year. It was a sign of the times: by November 2006 lots of business opportunities were opening up in the Web 2.0 ecosystem.| Cybercultural
Me and Alex Iskold, a few years after he began writing for Read/WriteWeb; photo by Mike Dunn| Cybercultural
At the end of June, 2006, I boarded a flight to Seattle for Chris Pirillo’s Gnomedex conference. For the second time, I got lucky with the weather in Seattle—it was the middle of summer and gloriously sunny. The event was being held at the Bell Harbor Convention Center, right on the waterfront, and I was staying at a nearby hotel.| Cybercultural
For the rest of the week after the Digg podcast call, I attended the 2006 Supernova conference, run by a business academic named Kevin Werbach. It wasn’t as good as the Web 2.0 Conference. In too many cases, panelists and speakers just talked about their own products or companies, and the event was targeted at businesspeople, not developers (the tagline was “Because technology is everyone’s business”). That was true of the Web 2.0 Conference as well, but developers were at least hangi...| Cybercultural
I'm there for the opening day of the second annual Web 2.0 Conference, held at the Argent Hotel in San Francisco. Plus I get to meet Mr Web 2.0 himself, O'Reilly Media CEO Tim O'Reilly.| Cybercultural
Cybercultural is a website covering internet history and the evolution of digital culture.| Cybercultural
With the rise of Flash and CSS in 1997, three web design philosophies emerged. David Siegel advocated for 'hacks', Jakob Nielsen kept it simple, while Jeffrey Zeldman combined flair with usability.| Cybercultural