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 January. But like many other software projects before and since, it got delayed....

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 gotten longer over the past year and now included many weblogs. Although there...

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 Buy Time Warner for $165 Billion,” the headline blared. Under the subhead...

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 browser market had shrunk to about 20% and Microsoft's Internet Explorer had...

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 first time. I'm not sure who coined it or where it came from, so I can't properly...

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 sharing platform of the internet age, for contributory and vicarious copyright...

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 doomerism — mixed with the increasing sophistication of computer graphics. Whatever it...

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, today announced a collaboration with legendary rocker David Bowie on Omikron: The...

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 eventually launch in 2003 — a virtual world in which cartoonish three...

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 German startup magazine called Stern. Lemm, who later in the article cited AltaVista...

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 season boundary is simply a given time period. I first became aware of 'seasons'...

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, MSN or Netcenter? Was it the VC-funded Excite or Lycos? All of them wanted your...