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, video games and the Internet.” The rest of us are “digital immigrants,” which...

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 from just 6% two years ago. Of course, broadband penetration would continue to...

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 serious in 2001 with "warblogs." During those early years of the form, I was...

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 introduced a version with 10GB of storage (approximately 2,000 songs). But it wasn’t...

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. Last.fm was founded in 2002 by a group of four Austrian and German students from...

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 drained Silicon Valley’s exuberance, Napster was being dismantled in court, and...

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 Diaryland. But by the end of the year, blogging had become a real-time reporting tool...

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, a public archive of web pages that was launched on October 24, 2001, at a...

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 the way up to a megabit per second all around the world.” Although he only...

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 pricked in March and then slowly deflated, but the web itself didn't stop growing....

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 new surroundings). I’m calling this activity “replanting” — because it feels...

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 “most influential people in electronic business.” Three of the four other companies...