Cybercultural
Cybercultural
Richard MacManus
Cybercultural chronicles internet history and its cultural impact, from the pre-web era to the dot-com boom, Web 2.0, and beyond. Written by pioneering tech blogger Richard MacManus.
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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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 posts on ReadWriteWeb in Web 2.0...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...