How the Internet Happened

by Brian McCullough

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  GOOGLE’S UNORTHODOX TRANSFORMATION into an advertising juggernaut had further, unexpected outcomes. Millions of small and medium-sized businesses eagerly signed up, advertisers who, in a previous era, might have paid for an ad in the Yellow Pages or taken out space in a local newspaper’s classified section. Now they were able to design and implement advertising strategies that had the same global reach as the web itself. The erosion of traditional advertising channels that had begun because of sites like eBay began to accelerate in the first half of the 2000s.

  This digital economy didn’t just flower on the marketing side of the equation, because Google had developed a way to monetize content as well. This was AdSense, which Google launched soon after AdWords. Google engineers dreamed up ways to syndicate text ads not just to major search sites and portals, but to the entire web itself. “The idea of putting ads on nonsearch pages had been floating around here for a long time,” Google executive Susan Wojcicki said later. Google already had basically the entire web in its index, so if it could find a way to match relevant ads to the content on other people’s web pages (just as it had matched relevant ads to search queries), Google could, in Wojcicki’s words, “change the economics of the web. You do the content and leave the selling of the ads to Google.”35

  When Google announced in February of 2003 that it was purchasing a small company named Pyra Labs, a lot of people were confused. In August of 1999, Pyra released a software program to help people “blog”—a phenomenon that was becoming popular at the tail end of the nineties. But then the bubble burst, venture capital dried up, and despite the fact that in one year, Pyra’s blogging platforms (Blogger, and later, Blogspot) went from hosting 2,300 blogs to 100,000 (and 700,000 a year after that), the company was on life support.36 Pyra’s cofounder Evan Williams (who would go on to be a cofounder of Twitter) laid off every employee of the company except himself and continued to run the sites on his own computer, on his own dime, from his own home.

  Google swooping in and rescuing Blogger seemed odd. Pyra Labs was a failed (failing?) company. Blogging was a new phenomenon that smelled very much like a fad to a lot of people. Pundits speculated that Google simply wanted Blogger to improve its algorithms. When AdSense was announced soon afterward, it suddenly all made sense: Google was now in the business of monetizing content on the web, and the long tail of content generated by the millions of blogs coming online from sites like Blogger and Blogspot would be the quickest way to scale up rapidly. It turned out that blogging represented the vanguard of a new kind of web, one that built off the original promise of the web as an interactive medium, but now in a new, more personal way. There was a whole new world of content being created on the web, and the creators were the web users themselves.

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  THE ROOTS OF BLOGGING are obscure. Perhaps the earliest version of the format came from a programmer at the University of Pennsylvania, Ranjit Bhatnagar, who, beginning in November of 1993, started posting, in reverse chronological order, what he had for lunch every single day at “Ranjit’s HTTP Playground.” Credit for coining the term “weblog” is generally given to the site Robot Wisdom WebLog, launched on December 17, 1997, by Jorn Barger. Shortening the term to “blog” is often attributed to Peter Merholz, who ran a personal website at Peterme.com.37 But it’s not entirely clear when simply publishing a webpage or a “homepage” morphed into publishing a “blog.” Ever since the web was born, the idea of webpages as individual soapboxes was one of the most obvious and enticing use cases for the technology. It all tied into the original utopian ideal of the web: anyone with an opinion or an insight could broadcast their truth to the entire planet, free from the oversight of the traditional gatekeepers who told you what you could and could not say. But blogging was somehow more personal and more purposeful than simply having a homepage. The whole point of having a blog was to share something with the world, anything from links to things you found cool, to the most intimate details of your life, to your manifesto for world peace. As Merholz himself said of the blogs, “These sites (mine included!) tend to be a kind of information upchucking.”38

  Justin Hall was one of the earliest “proto-bloggers.” On January 22, 1994, when he was just nineteen years old, Hall set up his own personal webpage, eventually named Justin’s Links from the Underground, using his student Internet account at Swarthmore College. More than most early web publishers, Hall’s subject matter for his website was himself: links, diary entries about his love life, gossip, pictures of his genitalia, etc. In 1994, he begged his way into an internship at HotWired and was present for the launch of that pioneering website. While at Wired/HotWired, he fell in with the Suck.com crew, who encouraged him to post to his website daily, as Suck was just then attempting. Hall took up the challenge and for an entire decade, nearly daily, links, photos, musings, diary entries, correspondence with readers, personal triumphs and mental breakdowns, all flowed freely on Hall’s homepage. Like Ranjit Bhatnagar, Hall felt there was nothing too personal or too mundane to share—even lunch. “It’s so much fun,” Hall would write, “putting everything out there.”39

  Dave Winer was a veteran software developer who simultaneously became entranced by the web’s promise of unfiltered honesty and discourse. Proprietor of a popular technology email discussion list read by industry insiders including Bill Gates, in October of 1994, he moved his musings to the web at DaveNet (eventually, Scripting.com). Like Justin Hall, Dave Winer was in love with the democratizing platform the web provided. “Imagine being able to find out what’s (*)really(*) going on in anyone’s life. What if everyone wrote about their issues. We could all learn from each other.”40 Winer became a vocal proselytizer for using your personal platform to engage; not just to publish, but to share, debate, argue, respond, provoke and question. DaveNet was his own personal soapbox, but he encouraged others to launch their own soapboxes. And because he was a gifted programmer, he was able to do more than just encourage others, he gave them the tools to do so as well, creating software programs like the NewsPage Suite, Radio UserLand, and Manila. These programs helped people set up their own soapbox-like websites, and helped formalize conventions we now understand as “blogging” like the reverse chronological format of updates, webrings and blogrolls to link to likeminded sites and the ability for readers to post comments on posts. Most crucially, he helped advance and popularize RSS (short for Really Simple Syndication), which helped bloggers alert the world when they had published something new.

  It was the new publishing tools, like Winer’s and like Blogger’s (eventually, there would be many more, such as Moveable Type, LiveJournal and WordPress), that really helped the medium of blogging take off. Even though creating a website was relatively simple from the very first days, publishing on the web still required some level of technical nous. Thanks to the explosion of blogging software, by the late nineties, you could push a button and, presto, you were published online.

  Matt Drudge was a twenty-eight-year-old sales clerk in the CBS studios gift shop in Hollywood when, in 1994, he launched an email newsletter focused on Hollywood gossip, some of which he overheard on the CBS lot, and some of which he later admitted had been pilfered from CBS’s mailroom wastebaskets. The newsletter evolved into a blog, because Drudge intuited that the web provided him with a platform that was as powerful as any news organization in the world. “I have no editor,” he would later tell Newsweek. “I can say whatever I want.”41 In a speech to the National Press Club after he had become world-famous, Drudge declared: “With a modem, anyone can follow the world and report on the world—no middle man, no big brother.”42

  Drudge gained his notoriety in January 1998 when, after Newsweek had determined the story too dubious to publish itself, he released the first rumors about Bill Clinton’s affair with a White House intern on the Drudge Report. One man’s digital soapbox nearly brought down the President of the United States. Within 6 months, the Drudge Report claimed 6 million monthly visitors, which repr
esented a greater readership than Time magazine.43 By 2007, with the help of a single employee by the name of Andrew Breitbart (later, founder of Breitbart News), DrudgeReport.com made millions of dollars a year from advertisements on the site from the likes of the New York Times.44

  Matt Drudge’s ascendance into the top ranks of newsmakers and publishers caught the attention of other Internet-savvy hustlers. Nick Denton had been a journalist at the Financial Times in London when the budding blogging scene caught his fancy. He began posting nearly daily on his own NickDenton.org. “You could express yourself,” he said of blogging’s simple appeal. “I could express opinions.”45 Feeding off the newness of blogging, and referencing the Fleet Street–style tabloids from his native Britain, as well as satirical publications like Private Eye and Spy, Denton launched a series of blogs under the umbrella company named after the first one to debut: Gawker.

  Launched in 2002, Gawker was a straight-up tabloid, covering the foibles of the New York media industry. “Nick had the brilliant insight that if you want to get people to read something, the easiest way is to write about them,” remembered Lockhart Steele, another early blogger whom Denton would eventually hire into the Gawker stable of writers.46 But, it was Gawker’s voice and attitude, its much-commented-upon “snarkiness” that really drew attention. Gawker had a habit of commenting on the news broken by other publications, linking to published pieces and offering commentary on them. Gawker also critiqued other publications themselves, often with viciously biting commentary. The editorial attitude of Denton’s publications drew a lot from the spitballing-from-the-back-of-the-classroom Suck.com. Indeed, when Denton launched the blog Wonkette, to lampoon the Washington, D.C., establishment, he hired a Suck alumna named Ana Marie Cox to do so.

  “EXCLUSIVE: The Condé Nast cafeteria”

  Filed to: Condé Nast

  Gawker had reported previously that the Hamburger Guy in the cafeteria had been fired after impatiently tapping the glass partition between himself and The Anna [Wintour, legendary editor in chief of Vogue] an act of insolence not to be repeated by any cafeteria slave wishing to end his or her day in the employ of Si Newhouse, Jr. Not so, said the mole. “He just wanted to learn how to make pasta, so they moved him.”

  GAWKER, MARCH 24, 2003, 1:22PM47

  Soon, Denton had his portfolio of blog publications covering a universe of topics from personal productivity (Lifehacker) to Silicon Valley (Valleywag) to video games (Kotaku) to sports (Deadspin). Denton kept expenses low, paying his bloggers a couple thousand dollars a month (at best) but expecting a dozen or more posts from each blogger, each day. By providing always new, always updating, always up-to-the-minute content, people would return again and again to Gawker’s blog feeds to find out what was going on in the world. “Immediacy is more important than accuracy,” Denton would say, “and humor is more important than accuracy.”48 Traditional journalists would scoff at the shoddy editorial standards of blogs like Denton’s, but they couldn’t argue with the way blogging began to drive the daily conversation in ways that traditional publishers couldn’t. By keeping his expenses low and taking advantage of the new advertising technologies like AdSense, Denton created a media empire one blog at a time. By 2007, Gawker had grown to around 100 employees and $10 million to $12 million a year in annual profits.49

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  WEB 2.0

  Wikipedia, YouTube and the Wisdom of Crowds

  In a way, blogging was simply the inevitable migration of publishing into the digital arena. The music site Pitchfork.com, which flourished in the early 2000s, was simply doing things that magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone had been doing in paper form for years: reviewing music and profiling new artists. But Pitchfork also encapsulates how blogging changed the media landscape in terms of taste-making and authority. Pitchfork allowed a slate of obscure music writers to challenge the established order merely by gaining credibility through the power of their unique point of view. This phenomenon, whereby the best content rose to the top and the most prominent voices became the new “establishment,” occurred in numerous interest niches across the Internet. From food to fashion, from automobile blogs to “mommy” blogs, even touching such rarefied academic arenas as finance, economics and the law, blogs allowed new voices to surface and claim the mantle of “expert,” without any official sanction, training or even previous experience.

  Perhaps the most illustrative example of this came in the realm of politics. September 11, 2001, was transformative for obvious reasons. But that tragedy was also the first time a historical event could be recorded online from the perspective of those who experienced it firsthand. Thousands of bloggers recorded their emotions and their impressions and even their direct experiences for posterity. “Only through the human stories of escape or loss have I really felt the disaster,” Nick Denton wrote for the Guardian newspaper on September 20, 2001. “And some of the best eyewitness accounts and personal diaries of the aftermath have been published on weblogs.”1 It was what Justin Hall had been advocating for years: the common man as recording vessel for history. “If everyone was to tell their stories on the web, we would have an endless human storybook, with alternating perspectives. . . . Give someone a digital camera, a laptop, and a cellular telephone, and you’ve got an on-the-spot multimedia storyteller from anywhere in the world.”2

  From the right side of the U.S. political spectrum, the response to 9/11 was immediate and strident. A group of conservative-leaning blogs like Instapundit, Little Green Footballs, Power Line and others, began advocating for an aggressive global war on terrorism. These sites were known collectively as the “war bloggers” in the coming years as they became vociferous cheerleaders for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Conversely, it was opposition to the Iraq War that saw a community of left-wing blogs spring up like MyDD, DailyKos, Eschaton, Hullabaloo and more. The lefty blogosphere called itself the “netroots” and could rightfully claim credit for giving energy to the brief, insurgent antiwar presidential candidacy of Howard Dean in 2003.

  Again, on both the left and the right side of the “blogosphere,” new voices rose from seemingly nowhere, gaining a reputation through smart comments posted on popular blogs, graduating to influential blogs of their own, and then often going on to positions of prominence at “mainstream” journalistic publications or even actual political positions. In the United States, we live in a post–political-blogging world where movements can arise online and take over the mainstream discourse. The most prominent examples of this new reality come from the right, in the form of the Tea Party movement and especially the Trump presidency, which has seen bloggers (in the form of Breitbart) ascend to the highest corridors of political power.

  But perhaps what’s most interesting to observe about the rise of blogging is how the habits and behavior of web users themselves changed. If the web in the dot-com era had been about, in the words of the technology journalist Sarah Lacey, “taking prepackaged content from the offline world and throwing it onto a site,”3 the new web was about you (and everybody else) putting up your own content, discovering it for yourself (and others), organizing it yourself and determining that your content was just as interesting and valuable as anything else in the media landscape. It had taken about a decade for mainstream users to acclimatize themselves to the web, but now that they had the lay of the land, they were no longer content to merely “surf.” Even everyday web users were now ready to participate in the web. As Marc Andreessen had anticipated all the way back in the days of the Mosaic browser, the “riff-raff” were ready to join the party in a major way, not just as consumers, but as producers. To quote the title of a popular book from shortly after this era, the postbubble Internet was a moment of Here Comes Everybody.

  Some credit can be given to Napster for opening these floodgates. All those tens of millions of users who traded MP3 files were proactively and spontaneously self-organizing and using their own libraries to create content for others. Napster was the first time mainstream we
b users saw the utility in producing, not just consuming, content. And baked into Napster was a “social” component to all this activity. If you found a song you liked from another user on Napster, you could also browse the other files in that user’s library. If you both shared an interest in a given band, then maybe you would like that other band that your friend on Napster had so many MP3s of. It was like the Netflix recommendation engine, but impromptu and self-created. It was the act of finding like-minded individuals, of creating community out of silos of shared interest.

  This “social” aspect of the web began manifesting itself in a number of ways beyond Napster and blogging. A link-blog site called Slashdot grew popular around the turn of the century by aggregating the blog-post and news-item deluge that came online every single day. In the comments of every link post, the thousands of members of the Slashdot community debated and discussed the posted articles. Order was given to the chaos by the Slashdot community itself. Randomly selected users were given moderation privileges to vote up or vote down content on a scale ranging from “insightful” to “troll,” thereby allowing the community to police discourse on its own.

  Digital cameras were just becoming popular in the early 2000s, and sure, you could make actual prints from your photos on your ink-jet printer and then mail those to your grandmother; but conversely, you could also just post an entire album online via a site like Flickr (launched in February of 2004) and simply send Nana the link to your Flickr page. More than that, you could share your pictures with complete strangers if you wanted to. How would strangers find your photos? Well, Flickr allowed you to “tag” your photos with keywords that enabled other users to search for them. If someone wanted to browse a bunch of photos of the Grand Canyon, they could type those keywords into Flickr and see the results of a thousand different strangers’ summer vacations.