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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Apple iPod generation 2 webpage, Aug-Sep 2002; via Wayback Machine. After the iPod’s launch in October 2001 — “1,000 songs in your pocket" — Apple sold 125,000 units of the new device by the end of the year. In March 2002, Apple...
Last.fm circa 2003; via Last.fm Flickr account. What we now know as the “social web” — or Web 2.0 — didn’t arrive until around 2004. But the first inklings of it were emerging a couple of years before. As usual, music was the harbinger....
Apple iTunes, the Rip Mix Burn advert, 2001; via YouTube (video embedded below). The year 2001 began with optimism — in January, Wikipedia debuted and Apple launched iTunes. But by year’s end the mood had shifted. The dot-com crash had...
Blogdex, a system launched in 2001 to track weblogs. At the beginning of 2001, most popular weblogs were a combination of personal journal and linkblog — a format encouraged by early blogging tools like Blogger, LiveJournal and...
Internet Archive website after the launch of Wayback Machine in October 2001. If the future is going to devolve into chaos, then the present ought to be preserved somehow, online. That was part of the thinking behind the Wayback Machine,...
Steve Jobs introducing the 'digital hub' concept, Macworld SF, January 2001; via Stefano Paris. When Steve Jobs opened Macworld on January 9, 2001, he boasted that in addition to the live audience in San Francisco, “we're streaming all...
Macromedia homepage, June 2000; via Internet Archive. After the hype and fear of Y2K (a.k.a. the Millenium bug) quickly faded in January 2000, the internet continued its mostly joyful rise in the culture. Sure, the dot-com bubble got...
I’ve begun a new archiving project: republishing articles I wrote a long time ago, but that have since disappeared from the web or been mangled in some way (for example, the page design is outdated or the content is out of place with its...
Shawn Fanning from Napster wearing a Metallica shirt to the 2000 MTV Awards; via Reddit. In May 2000, Napster’s poster boy, Shawn Fanning, was featured on the cover of BusinessWeek magazine in a suit and bowtie, alongside four other...
Slashdot homepage, 20 June 2000; via Wayback Machine. For the first several months of 2000, David Bowie’s website was a work in progress. BowieNet was undergoing a redesign, which had originally been scheduled to go-live at the end of...
Photo of the Seattle Central Library, taken 1 January 2000 by Thomas Hawk. By the start of 2000, blogging was becoming a communal activity. One of its pioneers, Cameron Barrett, had a “Sites I Visit Often” list in his sidebar that had...
Startupfailures.com, August 2000; via Wayback Machine. On Tuesday, 11 January, 2000, the front page of The New York Times announced a corporate merger that seemed to confirm the internet’s cultural ascendency. “America Online Agrees to...
1999 Napster software running on Windows 98; photo by Christiaan Colen. When AOL completed its acquisition of Netscape in March 1999, a part of the old web died forever. By the end of the year (and the century), Netscape's share of the...
Blogger, soon after its launch in August 1999. On January 26, 1999, Cameron Barrett — who ran a website called Camworld — pondered the meaning of a new term he’d recently discovered: “A few months back, I heard the term weblog for the...
Napster founders Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker in 1999; via trailer for 'Downloaded', a 2013 documentary by Alex Winter. On December 6, 1999, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Napster, the first major MP3 file...