The History of the Web

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How to Use the Web To Show the Truth

Published: 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.

Features

The Unlikely Pioneers of the Early Web

Published: April 23, 2018

How many websites are there? That’s not an easy question to answer. The web is, by its very nature, decentralized […]

Features

Bringing the Laughter, Week after Week

Published: July 21, 2020

The comedy web series was one of the more interesting and influential adaptions of the web medium. It reversed the principles of traditional entertainment to create videos that were more approachable.

Features

Reddit v. Digg: A Difference in Approach

Published: June 25, 2018

Jessica Livingston has a passion for the web’s future. It’s what lead her, in March of 2005, to quit her […]

Features

The mid-90’s was the era of the City Guide

Published: October 19, 2021

1996 was the year of the city guide. By 1998, they were already gone.

It’s 1997 And You Want to Take a Flight

Published: August 17, 2021

You might be surprised by what options you have. Already, in the late-90’s, travel was abuzz on the web. And the competition was fierce.

Features

The Power of the Pixel

Published: October 23, 2017

A lot can be done with each pixel on a website, but only a few people have tried creating websites one pixel at a time.

Features

What Happens When Yahoo Acquires You

Published: November 13, 2017

I could have titled this “A Tale of Two Acquisitions,” but I already used that one. Still, we’re going to […]

Features

Finding Our Digital Identities: A History of Social Media

Published: November 12, 2018

Benjamin Sun and Omar Wasow met for the first time in 1999. They had both recently struck out on the […]

Features

Dreaming Big on the Open Web

Published: October 1, 2018

The web has always belonged to all of us. That is to say its protocols and underlying technology are products […]

Features

Wikipedia: The Story of Collective Knowledge

Published: July 31, 2017

Wikipedia is a free, online, user-edited and user-contributed encyclopedia. It is also a stupendously simple and almost inevitable idea, but […]

Features

Let’s Talk About Elections on the Web

Published: 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.

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The History of the Web is a project by Jay Hoffmann. Get in touch.