Special Announcement Edition: The Web Turns 30 and Time for a Big Change

March 12, 2019

TL;DR I’m changing things up a bit. I’ll still be sharing history, but that history will look a bit different, and come to you little less frequently than every week. First one goes out next week. Also, a redesign! Haven’t signed up yet? Now’s your chance: Thirty years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee handed his employers at […]

Google Maps early design

What Does AJAX Even Stand For?

March 4, 2019

The term AJAX may have not been coined until 2005, but it’s origin stretches all the way back to the early 2000’s, when browsers provided developers with the glue between clients and servers.

The World Wide Web Recap, February 2019

February 25, 2019

Each month, I send out a list of links from my research or around the web. Here’s the very best links I found in February. Recreating the First Web Browser at CERN After rebuilding the first ever website back in 2013, the CERN hack team came back together this year for an even more ambitious […]

How to Use the Web To Show the Truth

February 18, 2019

Ushahidi is a platform that uses the democratizing power of the web to open access to citizen journalists on the ground and shine a light where the truth is hidden.

Alt.zines and Memories of a Media Transition

February 11, 2019

By Emerson Dameron In the late ‘90s, tiny magazines were having a moment. The popularity of underground punk and indie rock, together with the wide circulation of the review zine Factsheet Five, gave rise to zines, a subculture of shameless self-expression that was thriving around the same time millions of living rooms got their first […]

Salon in the year 2000

Warring Editorial

February 4, 2019

By 2000, Salon had made quite the name for itself with their quick, pithy headlines and stories that posted all hours of the day, around the clock. Their coverage of President Clinton’s impeachment trial was particularly exhaustive, with up to the minute updates multiple times a day. It was the closest you could get to watching the […]

The Web Recap, January 2019

January 28, 2019

I like to cap off each month with a few links I’ve found from my research or around the web. Here’s some cool links I found this month. The Other Art History: The Forgotten Cyberfeminists of ’90s Net Art Loney Abrams takes us back to the early ’90’s, when the ubiquity and accessibility of the […]

Todo MVC

Comparing the “Why” of Single Page App Frameworks

January 22, 2019

The web is filled with rundowns of this JavaScript framework versus that one. But we don’t often take the time to understand why they were built in the first place.

An Early History of Web Accessibility

January 14, 2019

Accessibility is one of the foundational principles of the World Wide Web. Fighting to preserve that principle are the creators behind the most powerful tools, some of which still exist today.

A screenshot of Textism from around 2001

A Toast to Some Great Blogs

January 7, 2019

The web has been… unpredictable. We usually think it will go one way, only to see it go another. Case in point. There were plenty that believed major media organizations would find their place on the web medium. What we didn’t expect so much was this totally unpredictable outgrowth of personal and boundless creativity, a […]

What Does “Public” Mean in the Modern Online World

November 26, 2018

danah boyd has studied social implications of our digital lives since the very beginning of her research career. In the mid 2000’s, she was working towards a Ph.D at the UC Berkley School of Information, focusing specifically on the role that social media was affecting a new generation of teenagers and youth . Boyd blogged […]

Screenshot of the profile for Myspace co-founder Tom Anderson

Finding Our Digital Identities: A History of Social Media

November 12, 2018

Benjamin Sun and Omar Wasow met for the first time in 1999. They had both recently struck out on the web as passionate early adopters. Wasow had just recently made a shift from running a pre-web Internet provider called New York Online to developing and designing websites for magazines like Vibe and Essence. Sun, on […]