This week on Cybercultural, more early-2000s Apple 🍎, including why Steve Jobs didn't want online music to go the streaming route (which of course it eventually did). https://cybercultural.com/p/ipod-2002/ #InternetHistory

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. In this week's Cybercultural, I look at the beginnings of Last.fm and Audioscrobbler. https://cybercultural.com/p/lastfm-audioscrobbler-2002/ #InternetHistory #OnlineMusic

This Day in 1988, the Morris worm infected 10% of the Internet within 24 hours

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/on-this-day-in-1988-the-morris-worm-slithered-out-and-sparked-a-new-era-in-cybersecurity-10-percent-of-the-internet-was-infected-within-24-hours

#HackerNews #MorrisWorm #CyberSecurity #InternetHistory #1988 #TechNews #VirusAlert

📧 Years before Google, “Gmail” lived on Garfield․com: fan email with @​gmail․garfield․com addresses for anyone thinking I hate Mondays.
It vanished like a pan of lasagne into Garfield’s belly… but its pawprints can still be seen on the #WaybackMachine ⤵️
https://web.archive.org/web/20000815064308/http://gmail.garfield.com/

🐈 By May 2001, it was replaced by @​e-garfield․com via Everyone․net. Google didn’t adopt the name until April 2004.

#Wayback1T #InternetHistory

"Geocities [which launched in November 1994] has a fascinating history. A roaring beginning, a dramatic climax, the most tragic of endings, and just a sprinkle of hope right at the end."

https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/an-ode-to-geocities/

#geocities #internet #TheWeb #InternetHistory #history

"Nettime has been widely recognized for its seminal role stimulating and disseminating ideas about Netzkritik or Net Critique, net.art, and tactical media and pioneered practices such as "collaborative filtering"."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nettime

The internet mailing list Nettime was created in 1995, 30 years ago.

https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9510/msg00000.html

#internet #TheWeb #history #InternetHistory #OTD #OnThisDay #MailingList #NetArt #nettime

Continuing my history of blogging and RSS series, I look at 2001: the year of warblogs, Movable Type and Blogdex. I see '01 as a transition year for blogging, in which it shifts from personal journaling to a more journalistic approach (although many personal bloggers resented the influx of warbloggers). There are lots of great 2001 screenshots in this post, so I hope you enjoy it. https://cybercultural.com/p/blogs-rss-2001/ #InternetHistory #Blogging

💾 Like many early social media platforms, Bebo went through an identity crisis: launching in 2005 with college students as its target audience, then expanding to teens, young adults, & eventually the general public.

See Bebo's brief history on the #WaybackMachine ⤵️
https://web.archive.org/web/20050601000000*/https://bebo.com

#Wayback1T #WebNostalgia #InternetHistory

Today, October 21, 2025, there is a rally in San Francisco in support of @internetarchive. Tomorrow, the Internet Archive is having a party to celebrate 1 trillion webpages archived. To show my appreciation for their most famous creation, the Wayback Machine, this week's Cybercultural post takes you back 24 years to its launch. Thank-you @brewsterkahle and long live the Internet Archive! https://cybercultural.com/p/wayback-machine-launch-2001/ #InternetHistory

Today, October 21, 2025, there is a rally in San Francisco in support of @internetarchive. Tomorrow, the Internet Archive is having a party to celebrate 1 trillion webpages archived. To show my appreciation for their most famous creation, the Wayback Machine, this week's Cybercultural post takes you back 24 years to its launch. Thank-you @brewsterkahle and long live the Internet Archive! https://cybercultural.com/p/wayback-machine-launch-2001/ #InternetHistory

This week on Cybercultural, I look back on Steve Jobs' January 2001 keynote at Macworld SF, when he announced iTunes and Apple's new "digital hub" concept. This was pre-iPod and of course pre-iPhone. The new strategy set the company up for a renaissance in the 21st century, when *everything* became digital. https://cybercultural.com/p/itunes-launch-2001/ #InternetHistory #ClassicApple

Netscape Navigator brought the web to millions 🌐 It was the first browser to reach mass adoption & introduce bookmarks, cookies, & JavaScript, features that shaped the modern web.

It also sparked early software-bundling debates & set the stage for the browser wars.

Its website is preserved on the #WaybackMachine. 1 in a Trillion pages saved ➡️
https://web.archive.org/web/19961101000000*/netscape.com

#Wayback1T #InternetHistory #Innovation #TechHistory

Let's take a trip back to the year 2000, 25 long internet years ago. A year in which Flash websites proliferate, blogging expands, social news sites like Slashdot gain influence — all of this while the dot-com bubble slowly deflates and Napster dominates headlines. https://cybercultural.com/p/internet-2000/ #InternetHistory

(special thanks to @GroupNebula563 & @Steve for suggesting Homestar Runner, the perfect Flash website suggestion for that year!)

This week on Cybercultural, let's re-live the Year of Napster: Shawn Fanning wearing a Metallica shirt to the 2000 MTV Awards, Lars Ulrich testifying to Senate and whining to the media (but in retrospect, was he right after all?!), Judge Patel calling Napster a monster, the media dreaming of a "heavenly jukebox", and — amid it all — a new legal alternative quietly emerges: SoundJam (soon to be known as iTunes). https://cybercultural.com/p/napster-itunes-2000/ #InternetHistory #Napster #iTunes

Alright, buckle up internet history fans: we've come to the RSS Format Wars! The year 2000 was when RSS got forked into 2 different protocols: Dave Winer's RSS 0.92 and the RDF-based RSS 1.0. What's remarkable, looking back, is that the top bloggers of the day — Kottke, CamWorld, Rebecca Blood, Brad Graham, and others — still weren't using RSS by the end of that year. But they *were* building blogrolls. https://cybercultural.com/p/blogs-rss-2000/ #InternetHistory #RSS

Alright, buckle up internet history fans: we've come to the RSS Format Wars! The year 2000 was when RSS got forked into 2 different protocols: Dave Winer's RSS 0.92 and the RDF-based RSS 1.0. What's remarkable, looking back, is that the top bloggers of the day — Kottke, CamWorld, Rebecca Blood, Brad Graham, and others — still weren't using RSS by the end of that year. But they *were* building blogrolls. https://cybercultural.com/p/blogs-rss-2000/ #InternetHistory #RSS

This week on Cybercultural, we enter the year 2000. It started with a bang, with the AOL-Time Warner merger in January. But by March, a slow deflation of the dot-com bubble had begun (Fast Company magazine had an ill-timed cover that month: "Built to Flip: Forget 'great companies', get rich quick!" — photo in the post). Meanwhile, later in 2000 the Web's golden boy Marc Andreessen returned with a new startup. https://cybercultural.com/p/dotcom-crash-2000/#InternetHistory #dotcombubble