Invented Here

fuck.com

fuck.com.

written in 1997

links.net - fuck.com
When I first started the Domain Name Game in 1994, securing fuck.com seemed a distinct possibility. If christian.org had been secured by out and out blasphemers, why couldn't I get a simple swear word?

Since then the Internet has grown by literally hundreds of thousands of percentage points, people have been busted big time for online obscenity - folks at InterNIC have become more cautious.

I exchanged a few letters over the legal implications of the registration, and finally spoke to someone over the issue.

In June 1995, I served on a think tank/panel with Jon Postel, the guy responsible for withholding the domain, at the time.

He wasn't a suit, he had longish gray frizzed hair, and a bushy santa-beard. He wore jeans and acted like an academic computer dude.

He noted that his authority to hand out domains is tenuous as it is, if he was responsible for doling out the controversial, some government beaurocracy might take over his job. He asked me, which would I prefer?

Since the Internic started charging for domains I'm not clear who has what authority these days, if I am now allowed to buy myself fuck dot com.

In the beginning ...

Alan Meckler blogs this lovely piece of Internet history. I remember the events he describes very well and I was upset when Mecklerweb was binned at the last minute. I wrote about it for my magazine. It did seem shortsighted, but I guess Alan was always one for the strategic view. It's great to see the backstory, even at this late stage. It resolves a little bit of history for me.

Internet History - MecklerWeb.

I recently came across a terrific bit of Internet history. Back in early 1994 I hired a fellow named Chris Locke to build a Web initiative for the company I ran at the time - Mecklermedia. Chris was one of the few people in the world who really "knew" the Internet and the recently announced World Wide Web. Chris and others believed that it would be extremely complex and difficult to create and run Web site --even for the largest organizations.

MecklerWeb was proposed as the Web solution for any company that wanted to have a Web site.

So take a look at the early proposal and the naive nature (now 12 years later)of the offering.

By the fall of 1994 Chris and I went our separate ways in terms of how the Web would develop. I believed that Mecklermedia needed a "vertical" position on the Web and Chris felt this was a bad decision. I felt at the time that Web sites would one day resemble magazine publising "online" and that this would be particularly true for trade publishing. The present day JupiterWeb is in fact a result of that decision.

Now read a pundit's report about my decision to change MecklerWeb. I am pleased the way things developed even though at the time I was lambasted not only by this report but also by Jared Sandberg in The Wall Street Journal. Our stock price got walloped over my decision. Time has proved to be my friend as my prediction back in 1994 proved to be 100 percent correct.

The Great Web Wipeout

This The Great Google Wipeout  Chronicle of a corporate death foretold.
By Jack Shafer

It wasn't like it had never happened before in the tech world. At the beginning of the 1980s, an Apple computer was the only box a self-respecting user would own. Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, IBM PCs, CompuServe, Nintendo, Netscape, AltaVista, AOL, Dell, the iPod, and Microsoft all held, at one time, what seemed like impregnable positions in their markets. In late 2005, as the price of a share of Google broke $400 and every software, advertising, print, broadband, and entertainment CEO in the country cowered in his executive bathroom sobbing about what the creative destruction crew from Google was doing to his business, the popular search engine seemed invincible.

credits this from 1996 as its inspiration. It's worth reading the whole things.

Wired 4.04: The Great Web Wipeout
By Chip Bayers

The dream ended quietly for the once scorching Web site known as The Spot. Still nursing New Year's Eve hangovers, several twentysomethings dressed in shorts and flip-flops held a somber party at The Spot's hip offices in Marina del Rey, California, drinking beer and waiting for one last user to tap into their server. Huddled around a terminal, the creators of the Web's sexiest serial soap opera managed a final, joyless cheer before unplugging their computers for good.

Meanwhile in Manhattan, a group of slightly older editors cleaned out their desks in a more conventional fashion at the offices of The New York Times Company. Most of them walked around in a state of shock: The Times' board of directors had just voted to shut down the newspaper's foundering Web division, after a loss of $30 million in less than a year. "We thought we were surfing the rising wave of the Web," says Steve Rago, whose job as vice president for strategy and new business development at The Times' New Media division had just been deleted. "And then it crashed over our heads."

Whether it's California start-ups or elite East Coast media institutions, an extraordinary series of bankruptcies and layoffs is reverberating through the once burgeoning online world‰and making waves in the economy as a whole. A year ago the Internet was filled with promise and hype. The free-for-all frenzy of the summer of 1996 led the more idealistic of the young Web-site creators to label themselves "The Webstock Generation," dedicated to creating a "Webotopia" online. The euphoria spread to even the most traditional media companies, who saw in the Web the genesis of a new medium-and a potential new profit stream-for the 21st century.

Origins of Hotmail

Viral Marketing.

Hotmail originally approached us as JavaSoft, Inc., a web database tools company, and, as Business Week recounted: Sabeer and Jack went to see "Draper Fisher Jurvetson, but the investor was unimpressed by their idea for database software for the Net. As they were packing up to leave, [the VCs] asked: 'Do you have any other ideas?' Sabeer said they'd noodled over a scheme to offer free, advertising-supported E-mail over the Web. A week and a half later, the venture capitalists ponied up $300,000, and Hotmail was born." (BW, August 25, 1997)

Worldwide wonder

The Guardian decides the tenth anniversary of the Netscape IPO is a decade worth marking.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Worldwide wonder.

Worldwide wonder

Leader
Monday August 8, 2005
The Guardian

The 10th birthday of the internet as a mass phenomenon is rightly being celebrated this week to mark a decade since the explosive stock market debut of Netscape, which triggered the dot.com boom and unleashed a friendly browser to navigate the web. To understand the extraordinary revolution that swept the world so quickly, existing users need simply to imagine what life would now be like without email (on which corporate life depends), search engines such as Google, web companies such as Amazon, eBay and Yahoo, the ongoing explosion of online commerce, not to mention the burgeoning world of personal journals (blogs), downloaded music and films, free newspapers, web cameras, internet telephony (now the hottest thing on the web) and the growing convergence of the net and mobile phones.

Webmedia

Webmedia
god, I hated this design period!

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web

We Are the Web.

We Are the Web The Netscape IPO wasn't really about dot-commerce. At its heart was a new cultural force based on mass collaboration. Blogs, Wikipedia, open source, peer-to-peer - behold the power of the people.

Origins

CNN.com have produced a great look back at the origins of the Internet with a load of charts and timelines and lists of key players. They left me off somehow though.

Before the Before the Web: BBS

For me, the BBS was a direct precursor to the Internet. After discovering the international networks in 1988, I lost contact with them when I left college in 1990. I started a project called ArtNet in 1991 and ran an ArtNet UK bulletin board for a few months that same year. It ran on a 386 PC in my London flat with its own single phone line. It maybe had seven users. After a while I went looking for Internet access to hook up to it, found Demon Internet and the rest is a part of history.

How Humble BBS Begat Wired World.

Remember when there was no e-mail or instant messaging? Reaching out to touch someone digitally once meant you had to dial into a phone line through your Trash-80 PC, type a message, post it to an online bulletin board and then wait weeks -- or more often months -- to get a response.

Before America Online, Friendster, forums and blogs, geeks communicated with one another in a clunky and pedestrian way that was the precursor to all subsequent forms of online communication.

It was called a bulletin board system, or BBS, and was essentially a virtual living room where people hooked up remotely to chat, exchange freeware or play computer games, albeit at a really slow speed.

Anyone nostalgic for those halcyon days can now thank digital archivist and filmmaker Jason Scott for BBS: The Documentary, a five-and-a-half-hour paean to the era when computers were named Stacy and Lisa, and tech loyalists fought bitter battles over the superiority of Ataris to Amigas.

Alan Meckler: CNN Gets The Web

Alan Meckler on wonderful form recalling the early days in order to leave aquestion hanging. CNN has lost it's lead in  cable TV, but is good at internet news. Fox leads in cable, but as with all Murdoch's ventures, is crap at online. At the beginning of 1995, when we had just started Webmedia, I was sent by headhunters to Sky's remote headquarters to discuss a job to head up their putative online services. The guy who interviewed me outlined internet delivered by satellite, but when I asked him how the outgoing connection was made he was stumpted. 'Our tech guys tell us it all works fine.' I wasn't even offered the job, and the product was never heard of again.

CNN Gets The Web.

CNN Gets The Web

The previous few years have not been good for CNN in the cable TV wars. CNN was once dominant in cable TV news, but no longer as FOX has become the new dominator in cable news.

In the Internet news arena, CNN.com is the leader with 22.4 million unique visitors per month. And where is FOX news online? FOX comes in with a mere 5.5 million users a month.

Much of this information was in the financial press on Monday. My reason in writing about this topic is that the one area that Rupert Murdoch has not mastered in the media world is the Internet realm.

I can remember back to 1994 when Murdoch had an online community called Delphi ---if anyone else remembers Delphi let us know?
In those days I predicted that there were would be three or four dominant community sites including AOL and of course Murdoch's Delphi.
Within a few months of that prediction, Murdoch pulled out of Delphi and to a degree abandoned the Internet. The next time the Murdoch name appeared in the Internet arena was during Spring Internet World 1997 when it was rumored that the Murdoch interests were going to buy Pointcast. Pointcast was into a gimmick called "push" technology and the Pointcast owners (the brothers Hassett(?) turned down a Murdoch cash offer of about $450 million. "Push" soon died and so too Pointcast.

Fast forward to now: FOX is a dominant in cable TV news, but a laggard in the Internet space. And CNN has lost its cable TV position, but dominates in Internet news. I love the irony. And I still wonder when and if the Murdoch interests will ever figure out the Internet?