We are still the web – the history of the web

Twenty years ago, in August 2005, Waded On founder of editor Kevin Kelly wrote “We are the web” for the magazine. He starts by looking ten years back to 1995, a few months before an IPO from Netscape would stimulate the growth of the web. There were of course many early adopters who believed in the promise of the web. But much more were critical of the web, in the conviction that there would never be enough content or enough trade without mass consolidation to make the web really viable.

They missed a little right before them. The audience.

Kelly then moves to his own contemporary, the web of 2005. The web that he did not know at that time was not consolidated, it became a place of open creation. He paints with a wide brush, but the pattern is relatively clear. It was the audience, the people who used the web, who made it a success. Companies, websites and communities that embraced were the first to succeed.

E-commerce sites such as eBay helped to prove that point, where users literally made the content. Other platforms leaned to Open APIs, allowing content to spread outside the walls of a website and in the corridors of the public web. Forums arose on the back of his contributors and helped to find millions they were looking for. The Open Source movement exploded at the time and created software that was like the backbone of the web.

Participation was at the center of all this. The web would literally be nothing without jointly participating in creation. Through that creation, they have contributed to what Kelly calls the ‘gift economy’, which nourishes’ an abundance of choices. It appeals to the grateful to answer. It allows easy change and reuse and thus promotes consumers to producers’. By 2005 the number of web pages had reached nearly 600 billion.

In no corner of the web was this clearer than in the blogosphere.

No webfenomenon is more confusing than blogging. Everything that media experts were aware of the public – and they knew a lot – confirmed the conviction of the focus group that the audience would never get rid of their butts and begin to make their own entertainment.

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What a shock then, to witness the near-instantaneous increase of 50 million blogs, with a new one that appears every two seconds. There – a new blog! Another person who does what AOL and ABC – and almost everyone – expected that only AOL and ABC would do. These channels created by the user do not make sense economically. Where do the time, energy and resources come from?

The audience.

Blogging was something that nobody could predict. It started on personal sites like Justin’s left And Caroline Diary. In response to regular media and news of twenty -four hours of news, it spread that their audience failed in the uncertain and scary post 9/11 world. This led to political blogs such as entryundit, The Daily Dish and the Drudge Report, which offered a different kind of reactive and editorial report, which often opened for comments and participation directly from their audience.

Supported by blog platforms such as WordPress, movable type, live journal and blogger, and catalyzed by the 2004 presidential elections, blogging saw a huge turnout in the run -up to Kelly’s piece. At the end of 2004 there were reportedly around 8 million blogs. A year later, at the end of 2005, that number had grown to 30 million. According to some reports, 30,000 to 70,000 blogs were made everywhere Every day.

There were not many people who could have predicted how popular and how essential blogging would be at that time. It was all about the promise of the web, it is the most direct and active form of participation of its users.

Towards the end of his piece, Kelly flashes ahead to 2015. He predicts a web driven by Open Source, fully fed by active makers who each participate at their own angle of the web. Blogging would continue, and open APIs would lead to an even broader range of possibilities. Some of these are interesting predictions, for example that operating systems would largely go to the web and strengthen a new wave of AI.

But what he did not see was that 2005 would also act as a sort of turning point. A final wave of active participation about the open web before people enter and move their participation to centralized platforms and social media networks that feed their own algorithms.

That was twenty years ago. It is a useful time to think about the 2005 lessons that are reversed in some respects.

There are still many blogs, 600 million by some accounts. But they have been replaced by social media networks over the years. The trade on the internet is consolidated among fewer and fewer sites. Open Source remains an important backbone for web technologies, but it is almost fully under -financed and powered by the generosity of its contributors. Open APIs hardly exist. Forums and comments sections find it more difficult and harder to defeat the spam. Users still participate in the web every day, but it increasingly feels like they do that despite the largest web platforms and sites, not because of them.

And yet we are at an interesting moment of uncertainty. Many people have found a way to undermine the standards of the web of the past 10 years. They have escaped a little more fragmented, where their data is not scraped and monitored. Just like in 1995, experts predict that this is not sustainable and that platforms will consolidate when pursuing profit. Again, they are focused on where the money comes from.

It is possible that we are still I miss what is right in front of us. The audience.

The web is made for participation, naturally and by the design. It cannot be flown long. In 2005, blogging was the answer to the question of what will come next. I look at the history and I am often wrong with the future. But I do know that the audience will tell us whatever the next thing is this time.

If you are looking for it, there is convincing evidence that tides are running. Ted Gioia recently wrote about how the audience is looking for longer, more in -depth and more “abundant” media than in years. Not because there is more available, but despite Silicon Valley and large Mediacongglomerates who try to force them in the other direction, to short form videos.

AI can get into trouble While people continue to maintain that they would rather talk to each other than a robot. Independent journalists Those unique and authentic connections with their readers are now possible. Open social protocols that experts Real conflict To understand, it is powered by a community that talks to each other.

The web is just people. Many people, connected in global networks. In 2005 it was the audience that the web made. In 2025 it will be the audience again.