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 […]

Screenshot of a terminal accessing an early digital bulletin board system

Connecting Computers to People, BBS And Its Effect on the Web

November 5, 2018

The Internet does not begin and end with the World Wide Web. Sometimes, if we want to truly understand how the web developed, we need to step back to a world where it never existed at all. The Internet invigorated us with a new kind of spirit; it created a new way of seeing, feeling […]

The History of the Web’s Monthly Blogroll, October 2018

October 29, 2018

Back in the earliest days of the web, some blogs used to have a blogroll. Somewhere on their site, usually in the sidebar, they’d list out a few links from their favorite blogs in no particular order. Before search and social media, the blogroll was key to discovery on the web and connected readers with […]

Homepage of Lynda.com around 2003

The Books That Shaped How We Learn About the Web

October 22, 2018

It might seem strange to talk about books on the web, but when designers first turned to books for a way to learn about the web, Lynda Weinman and Jennifer Robbins showed them the way.

Cover of Wired Magazine in 2010 declaring that the "Web is Dead"

The Day the Web Died

October 9, 2018

On August 7, 2010 Wired declared that the World Wide Web was dead. The cover that graced the newstands that month featured a bold orange background splash with large black text words that simply read “The Web is Dead” (pictured above). The release was provocative and timely, just a few months before the 20th anniversary of the […]

Dreaming Big on the Open Web

October 1, 2018

The web has always belonged to all of us. That is to say its protocols and underlying technology are products of the public domain and can be used by everyone, everywhere. By design, and with prescribed purpose, the web is open. Some of the first voyagers on the web’s shifting shores believed almost unblinkingly in […]

The History of the Web’s Monthly Blogroll, September 2018

September 24, 2018

Back in the earliest days of the web, some blogs used to have a blogroll. Somewhere on their site, usually in the sidebar, they’d list out a few links from their favorite blogs in no particular order. Before search and social media, the blogroll was key to discovery on the web and connected readers with […]