In the first few years of the web’s spread to ubiquity, traditional news publishers moved online. But a new kind of publisher was also born, one that was native to the web, with a whole new set of rules.

If you happened to live in Santa Cruz in 1994 you could sit down at your computer, open up your favorite browser, and then go ahead and order a pizza online. You could do all of this on PizzaNet, owned and operated by Pizza Hut. PizzaNet was an experiment that launched in the early 90’s, […]

The design community in particular has been a rather dynamic part of the fabric of the web from its earliest days. Designing for the web means understanding the constraints of the screen while simultaneously accounting for a whole host of variables, like hover states and animation and screen resolutions and network connections. It requires a […]

If you don’t know much about the Opera browser, that’s probably because their market share in the United States has never been particularly high (right now, it stands at around 1.5%). Opera’s competitive advantage is that they deal with the real world. They solve problems that other browsers don’t, and they do it globally and […]

It’s been over seventeen years since the world ended. Or, rather, it was supposed to be The End of the World as We Know It. If that sounds like a big deal that’s because, at the time, it truly was. This is how things were supposed to go down. On January 1, 2000 at the […]

Jessica Livingston has a passion for the web’s future. It’s what lead her, in March of 2005, to quit her day job and help start up a new kind of investment firm called Y Combinator. Livingston had been a director at another VC firm, but she wanted to do things a bit differently with Y […]

If you work on the web, you know that with software, things don’t always go right the first time. The web is this massive, global community tinkering with loosely connected technologies to piece together websites that, with any luck, work well together. These tools and technologies are always in flux and there have been plenty […]

While looking into the rather storied history of Internet Cafe’s, I found myself following a kind of tangential story about cafe’s that opened up in East Asia. As it turns out, they took an entirely different form there. One of the first Internet Cafe’s, named simply Electronic Cafe, opened up in Seoul, South Korea in […]

In the mid-90’s, Aliza Sherman moved to New York City. She had been bouncing around for a while in the music industry, working with artists like Tracy Chapman, Elvis Costello, and Metallica. In New York, Sherman hoped to settle down a bit and explore her newest passion: working with the web. She started a small […]

I’ve been digging into the history of search engines and centralized platforms lately. Mostly my goal has been to uncover what happened on the web to make privacy a commodity that is less than sacred, and intensive advertising the dominant business model. It’s easy to think that our current modus operandi (tracking scripts that follow […]

It started with a simple manifesto. A manifesto posted online with 37 guiding principles, small phrases showcasing big ideas like “We See People” and “Not Full Service” and “We Don’t Throw Curves.” The website was a list of rules for a web design agency to follow, created by Jason Fried, Carlos Segura, and Ernest Kim […]