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Once In An Internet Lifetime: Have You Asked Yourself, "How Did I Get Here?"
"And you may ask yourself
Does any other song foretell the advent of the Internet than the Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime"? How else could we today find answers, solutions, new cars, real estate or even a new wife/spouse/girlfriend?
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!"
While MTV was re-inventing pop culture on cable in the early '80s, David Byrne was telling us about our digital future (with a music video on MTV, of course....back when MTV actually played music videos).
Many people credit AOL's Windows-version release in 1993 as the beginning of the Internet Age we know today. At the time, users of what then was known as the World Wide Web mainly used limited graphical interfaces online like Compuserve or Prodigy (remember that?)
For the most part, most web activity was DOS- and text-based because of small computer hard drive memory capacities and slow (very slow) dial-up modem tranmission rates. The fast-popularity of AOL in 1993 and 1994 opened the Web's possibilities, delivering the easiest and most-convenient way to get "logged on" and surf. In many ways, those AOL days parallel the rise of Google a decade later.
Did you know the core beginning of AOL actually launched in 1985? At first, it was designed for use on Commodore business computers for data exchanging between terminals and later for Tandy computers. It's first graphical design was issued for Apple's Macintosh and Apple II computers in 1989. The Apple design fine-tuned the Web experience. Once released to the wider PC user base, Web usage exploded with new growth.
In the dozen years or so since the debut of Web browsers that turned the Web into a graphics-rich environment (AOL as well as Netscape and Explorer), the migration to life online has been all-encompassing. Below, a small sampling of the many milestones.
1995:
* Netscape goes public. Amazon.com and eBay launch. There are an estimated 100,000 sites on the web, up from some 623 in 1993.
1998:
* Google opens with a staff of 3 after a successful university thesis on Internet searching.
1999:
* Blogger, one of the first popular weblog publishing tools appears.
* Craigslist, which began as an e-mail list of arts events in San Francisco, becomes an online classified ads-listing company.
2000:
* An average 52 million adults are online, about 5 million with high-speed internet access at home. As the year closes, there are 25.6 million websites.
* Google handles more than 100 million queries a day.
2001:
* Apple introduces the iPod.
2002:
* 65% of American children ages 2-17 use the Internet, up from 41% in 2000.
2003:
* MySpace and Friendster launch, putting "social networking site" in the vocabulary.
* One-millionth iPod is sold.
2004:
* Audio blogging is dubbed podcasting, and how-to articles begin to appear.
* Flickr, the photo-sharing/social networking site, launches.
* A typical day sees 128 million U.S. adults online. About 60 million have high-speed connections at home.
2005:
* eBay has 79 million U.S. members, 168 million worldwide.
* MySpace has 40 million members.
* 87% of 12- to 17-year-olds use the Internet.
* Technorati tracks 22.9 million blogs.
* By midyear, Flikr has 775,000 users and is growing about 30% a month.
* LiveJournal reports 2.5 million active accounts.
* 10 million Craigslist users search some 6.5 million classified postings each month.
Source: Pew Research Center For The People & The Press: Mid-September 2005 Political Survey, September 15 , 2005
cool article on how the Web has impacted our understanding of media and information gathering, click here.
posted by Unknown @ Monday, March 20, 2006,
