March 2020 Weblog: Trying to Think about Something Else

March 27, 2020

March has been a weird month, but the web trudges onward.

A table or desk full of "I Voted" stickers from a United States election

Let’s Talk About Elections on the Web

March 3, 2020

The politics of campaigns have been massively influenced by the tonal shift of the web, and they will likely never be the same.

February 2020 Weblog: We blog, you blog

February 26, 2020

This month is all about blog posts, from pesonal experiences with the web to the long-term effects of social media.

Logo for The Tech newspaper, MIT's longest running newspaper

The Tech: The First Newspaper published online

February 18, 2020

The first newspaper published online is not what you think. It began with the smallest of steps, when a group of students chose to experiment with the web.

A screenshot of IMDb's homepage in the early 2000's

The Linguist and the Programmer

February 4, 2020

A history of Perl, Python, and the websites that rely on them.

January 2020 Weblog: It’s a New Year, Let’s Try New Things

January 29, 2020

Quick personal note. Now seems like as good a time as any to try out a few new things on this blog / newsletter / timeline. So in no paritcular order, here’s a quick of laundry list of stuff I’ll be trying. Let’s see how I do. I want to tweet more. In the coming […]

The First Website in the United States Was Made for Physicists

January 21, 2020

Tim Berners-Lee has said, on multiple occasions, the the first website in the US was one of the major reasons the web took off. But what did it do and why was it so important?

The modern day webby awards logo

The Web and the Webbys Grew Together

January 7, 2020

The Webby Awards was founded way back when no one knew if the web would take off. When we take a look at the Webbys, we see the web’s history.

December 2019 Weblog: I Hope Next Year Goes Better

December 23, 2019

This decade was not great for the web… There’s more than a few decade retrospective think-pieces making the rounds right now, but here’s a real kicker from Clio Chang, The Decade the Internet Lost Its Joy. Chang’s essential argument is that over the last ten years the web has gotten worse in every conceivable way. […]

My copy of Jargon on my desk

What’s With All the Internet Slang Anyway?

December 3, 2019

This post starts with a book. This book: It’s called Jargon: An Informal Dictionary of Computer Terms. That’s my copy. It’s a book I stumbled on while researching this topic, and one I’ve come to truly love for a variety of reasons, not the least of which because it’s written by Robin Williams who may but […]

November 2019 Weblog: Pre-Thanksgiving Wishes for the Web

November 26, 2019

Join me at Flashback Conference, February 10-11 in Orlando In February, I’ll be in Orlando, Florida giving a talk at Flashback Conference, a conference focused on the development of the web, and how its past has informed its present. It’s the first of its kind, which is going to pretty great right there, plus I’ll […]

Sorry Computer, You’re Not a Teapot

November 19, 2019

You are reading this somewhere. On your laptop or on your phone or in your email or RSS reader. If you’re reading this on the web, then this page was delivered from my server to you via a protocol called HTTP. There’s all sorts of fascinating things I can say about HTTP, but the important […]