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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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. Perhaps it was the end of millennium — and its attendant Y2K...
One of David Bowie's characters in the 1999 3D game, Omikron: The Nomad Soul. On May 12, 1999, a surprising announcement came over the wires. “Eidos Interactive, a leading worldwide developer and publisher of interactive entertainment,...
BowieWorld, via mutant ratz on YouTube. In January 1999, BowieNet members were sent a CD that contained software for BowieWorld, a 3D chat environment built by a company called Worlds.com. It was a basic version of what Second Life would...
Google founders, 1999; photo by William Mercer McLeod. "Aren’t you rather late to the game?" It's January 1999 and that question was put to Google's young founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The interviewer was Karsten Lemm from a...
One of the innovations of podcasting is its concept of "seasons," which originally comes from the world of television. The idea is that you have a time-bounded series of podcast episodes — sometimes with a set theme, but other times the...
Do you Yahoo!?; a 1998 TV advert. For web users, 1998 was all about which portal you frequented. Was it Yahoo! with its massive directory of links (and partnership with the search engine AltaVista)? Was it the browser company portals,...
Recreation of Google's 1998 home office; via Google blog. 1998 was the last year of the web before Google began setting the agenda in search. During that year, there were hints that Google was emerging — even before it officially...
CDnow homepage, December 1998; via Wayback Machine. 1998 started promisingly for CDnow, a leading online music retailer — or "e-tailer" as e-commerce sites were sometimes called at the time. "CDnow goes public with a bang," read a CNET...
BowieNet homepage on launch; via Wayback Machine. BowieNet launched as an ISP in North America on September 1, 1998 for $19.95 per month; and if you lived elsewhere, as a “premium content” service for $5.95 per month. If you had visited...
Excite portal, July 1998. When BowieNet was “pre-launched” on his main website at the end of June 1998, commentators saw it as an attempt to “creatively up the ante in the portal war,” as Beth Lipton wrote in a CNET report. “Large Net...
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. In 1997, the World Wide Web finally went past 1 million...
Decaf or Java — which version of MTV's website should you choose? Part of the reason it was so difficult for both digital music and video webcasts to gain traction on the web over 1997 was the fickleness of the underlying software: the...
My well-thumbed copies of three classic web design books: 'Creating Killer Web Sites' by David Siegel (1996-97), 'Taking your Talent to the Web' by Jeffrey Zeldman (2001), and 'Designing Web Usability' by Jakob Nielsen (1999). Like many...
U2 promoting their 1997 album 'Pop' with a VDOLive and RealVideo website; June 1997 screenshot via Wayback Machine. Online music companies like N2K and Liquid Audio were mostly concerned with music downloads, but it was now possible to...
Duran Duran promoting their 1997 online single, Electric Barbarella; image via a fan site. At the same time as the prototype of BowieNet was being developed, key advancements were being made in online music distribution — a trend Bowie...