To see a World in a Grain of Sand and a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand and Eternity in an hour. - William Blake
This morning Matt Drudge linked to a story about the Webby Awards, the so-called “the leading international award honoring excellence in web design, creativity, usability and functionality.”
The Drudge Report’s breaking story about the married president Slick Willie’s sexual romps with a woman not his wife was chosen as the second most influential Internet moment in the past 10 years (see Blogging Matt Drudge for background).
The decade’s most influential moment was the dot com booms and busts:
Launched by Netscape’s IPO in 1995, the boom spurred billions of dollars in private investment in the Internet, new technologies, marketing, and fiber optic cable and led to the development of such landmark sites as Google.
“Though now often synonymous with failures … the dotcom boom and bust was critical to fast-tracking the spread and popularity of the Internet,” the Webby committee said.
In 1995, there were 16 million people online, compared to the current estimate of 957 million.
I imagine that few of us take time to think about the importance of that occasion. In our lifetimes, we’ve seen a paradigm shift of dramatic proportions. The Internet, for better or worse, has changed the way we live, think, and view the world.
The globe is still a vast expanse in reality, but the world in our minds is a growing collection of interlinking ideas, thoughts, documents, people, projects, locations — almost beyond comprehension. You couldn’t overstate it if you tried.
The Webby Awards article reminded me of the August 2005 issue of Wired Magazine, which highlighted a few of the most amazing events in the past 10 years that shaped the network we now take for granted, including the invention of the Netscape browser.
World Wide Web
In We Are The Web, Kevin Kelly writes:
The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous. Today, at any Net terminal, you can get: an amazing variety of music and video, an evolving encyclopedia, weather forecasts, help wanted ads, satellite images of anyplace on Earth, up-to-the-minute news from around the globe, tax forms, TV guides, road maps with driving directions, real-time stock quotes, telephone numbers, real estate listings with virtual walk-throughs, pictures of just about anything, sports scores, places to buy almost anything, records of political contributions, library catalogs, appliance manuals, live traffic reports, archives to major newspapers - all wrapped up in an interactive index that really works.
I discovered the Internet in 1995, and the only words in my vocabulary to describe the phenomenon to those who didn’t use it were “layers, upon layers, upon layers of information.” As I surfed the web, I didn’t realize I was seeing only a microscopic tip of a universe-shattering iceberg.
In one form or another, the idea of an Internet has existed for years. But it wasn’t until the invention of a browser called Netscape that non-nerds would uncover a world that seemed to exist in another dimension.
Companies were resistant to investing in the Internet years ago because many saw it as expensive, hard-to-use, boring, and used mainly by teenage boys. In other words, nerds. After Netscape went public in 1995 with stock peaking at $75 on the first day, the World Wide Web expanded and blossomed, and companies began to invest in the development of a staggering amount of information.
Think about it. Where else could you communicate with people all over the planet and create a network of hyperlinks connecting similar and disparate web sites and ideas, owned by no one? The Netscape Navigator was so named because of its power to guide users from one destination to another. Surfers are figuratively transported.
As soon as you go online, you’re connected to a network. When you click on a link to view a web page, trillions of bits and bytes of information flow from one computer to another, and anyone — not just private companies, or the government or a privileged few — can create the content that flows through the wires and cables.
Don’t be too jaded to contemplate this mind-shifting and totally unexpected achievement.
Linking Makes the World Go Around
Did you know that Google, the world’s greatest search engine, began as a tool to analyze links? From The Birth of Google:
Page noticed that while it was trivial to follow links from one page to another, it was nontrivial to discover links back. In other words, when you looked at a Web page, you had no idea what pages were linking back to it. This bothered Page. He thought it would be very useful to know who was linking to whom….
He reasoned that the entire Web was loosely based on the premise of citation - after all, what is a link but a citation? If he could divine a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page puts it “the Web would become a more valuable place.”
Larry Page built a “crawler” to discover the millions of documents on the web, and a primitive Google was born.
Linking is what makes the Internet useful, and the quality of links is becoming more important that the quantity of links on a site. If you’ve been blogging long enough, you understand and appreciate the value of links. If you say you don’t, you’re either in denial or not a true blogger.
The Stratosphere of the Blogosphere
You, an ordinary person, can create a blog for free in five minutes. You can play reporter and investigate people, places, and things, and self-publish your news stories. You can post pictures, sound files and video, too. If you build up enough traffic and linkage, people and companies will give you money to advertise on it.
Some people don’t like comparisons between blogging and the Protestant Reformation and printing press, but I do. For my take on blogging, read the entire blog. If you don’t have time, see the following:
The Information Reformation
Blogger Nation
Mini-review of BLOG
Easongate
Rathergate
I’ll conclude the post with one more quote from Kevin Kelly about the Internet:
Why aren’t we more amazed by this fullness? Kings of old would have gone to war to win such abilities. Only small children would have dreamed such a magic window could be real. I have reviewed the expectations of waking adults and wise experts, and I can affirm that this comprehensive wealth of material, available on demand and free of charge, was not in anyone’s scenario. Ten years ago, anyone silly enough to trumpet the above list as a vision of the near future would have been confronted by the evidence: There wasn’t enough money in all the investment firms in the entire world to fund such a cornucopia. The success of the Web at this scale was impossible.
At the risk of sounding corny or melodramatic, I’ll confess that the power of an awesome, expanding, and evolving invention like the Internet (in my lifetime) leaves me breathless.
Friend and colleague Ken Yarmosh of Technosight blogged about a debate between blogger Glenn Reynolds, author of An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths, Joe Trippi (former manager for Howard Dean), and Barry Lynn at the National Press Club. 
