Happy 25th anniversary to this Daily Mail article from the year 2000, proclaiming that internet "may be just a passing fad as millions give up on it".
theweb
The annual celebration of HTML, HTML Day 2025 is coming up on August 2.
"On Saturday, August 2nd, 2025, we'll be gathering in places around the world to write and celebrate HTML."
via https://xoxo.zone/@waxy/114921694060600175
#TheWeb #internet #IndieWeb #HTMLDay #HTMLDay2025 #html #PersonalWebsites #PoeticWeb
In a January 1999 interview with The Guardian, Bowie tried to explain his approach to the internet as an artist.
"Interaction on the Web is a little like a mirror, like communicating with a manifestation of yourself. Because it is so chaotic, so decentralised, I find that using the Web becomes like communicating with a hardware version of me. It's not exactly a doppelgänger, but an alternative version of myself."
https://cybercultural.com/p/online-identity-bowieworld-1999/
#internet #TheWeb #cyberculture #OnlineIdentity #OnlineCommunities
Oh come on.
"We are observing stealth crawling behavior from Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine. Although Perplexity initially crawls from their declared user agent, when they are presented with a network block, they appear to obscure their crawling identity in an attempt to circumvent the website’s preferences."
"Interaction on the Web is a little like a mirror, like communicating with a manifestation of yourself. Because it is so chaotic, so decentralised, I find that using the Web becomes like communicating with a hardware version of me. It’s not exactly a doppelgänger, but an alternative version of myself."
"By the end of 2000, the web had settled into a strange dual state: the financial euphoria of the dot-com boom was gone, yet the culture of the web had never felt more alive."
The Wayback Machine was launched 24 years ago!
"The Wayback Machine has a pulse, rhythmic and steady as it loops endlessly through the spaces of the web."
https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/archiving-the-web/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayback_Machine
#OnThisDay #OTD #history #internet #TheWeb #InternetArchive #WaybackMachine
"Nettime has been widely recognized for its seminal role stimulating and disseminating ideas about Netzkritik or Net Critique, net.art, and tactical media and pioneered practices such as "collaborative filtering"."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nettime
The internet mailing list Nettime was created in 1995, 30 years ago.
https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9510/msg00000.html
#internet #TheWeb #history #InternetHistory #OTD #OnThisDay #MailingList #NetArt #nettime
"Geocities [which launched in November 1994] has a fascinating history. A roaring beginning, a dramatic climax, the most tragic of endings, and just a sprinkle of hope right at the end."
"On 12 November 1990 [Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau] published a formal proposal outlining principal concepts and defining important terms behind the web. The document described a "hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" in which a "web" of "hypertext documents" could be viewed by “browsers”."
https://home.cern/science/computing/where-web-was-born
https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html
#WorldWideWeb #HypertextProject #TheWeb #internet #TechHistory #technology #OnThisDay #OTD
"In the beginning, the Web was simple. When I first encountered it in early 1993 (working for O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator[...]), there was only one browser for viewing web pages and it ran exclusively on the Unix platform. There were about a dozen tags that made any difference. Designing a web page was a relatively simple task."
"By the end of 1994, there were roughly 10,000 websites on the web. It was still early days and most of the websites were quite basic in structure."
"That's my belief. It just takes a bit of guidance and access to understandable knowledge. That word 'understandable,' it's important. You don't introduce people to website building by using geek-speak. You have to talk human to human..."
"These places only exist when the people investing their time and energy know that they are appreciated, credited, and supported."
Good reminder to, if you can't support the creators of your favorite websites financially, at least tell them how much you appreciate their time and effort.
https://aftermath.site/ians-shoelace-site-is-still-the-best-destination-for-tying-your-shoes/
An article from last year that celebrates the 40th anniversary of ".com".
"Four decades ago, the first domain was registered and the initial batch of top-level domains came to be. Nearly a billion domains have been registered since then."
https://www.dotcom.press/history-of-domains
The very first website is 35 years old today, and you can still visit it at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html!
"On August 6, 1991, the first website was introduced to the world. [It] contained information about the World Wide Web Project. It launched at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, where it was created by British computer scientist @timbl."
Happy birthday, web!
Here's @matthiasott on the importance of human curation in the world flooded by AI slop.
"So what becomes valuable, in a world like this? Not more content. We are drowning in content. What becomes valuable is someone you trust, saying: This is worth your time. Here’s why."
https://newsletter.ownyourweb.site/archive/own-your-web-issue-18-curators/