This week on Cybercultural, let's re-live the Year of Napster: Shawn Fanning wearing a Metallica shirt to the 2000 MTV Awards, Lars Ulrich testifying to Senate and whining to the media (but in retrospect, was he right after all?!), Judge Patel calling Napster a monster, the media dreaming of a "heavenly jukebox", and β€” amid it all β€” a new legal alternative quietly emerges: SoundJam (soon to be known as iTunes).
Cybercultural
2000: The Napster Monster and Apple’s Heavenly Jukebox
Napster's legal woes intensify in 2000, even as creator Shawn Fanning is celebrated on MTV and on magazine covers. Meanwhile, Apple acquires a star...
 #InternetHistory #Napster #iTunes
In this week's Web Technology News, I discuss my interview with Evan You β€” the creator of Vite and (I'm suggesting) one of the new rock stars of web development.
Web Technology News
WTN #8: The New Rock Stars of Web Development
I got to talk to one of the rock stars of frontend development this week. No, not DHH! I mean a young man named Evan You, whose Vite build tool is ...
 As usual, you'll also find other news in these 3 categories: Web Platform, Open Social Web, Web + AI. Fedi folk featured in this week's newsletter: @Jared White (ResistanceNet ✊), @Cloudflare, [@_elena](
Mastodon
Elena Rossini ⁂ (@_elena@mastodon.social)
671 Posts, 469 Following, 10.8K Followers · Italian filmmaker, photographer and writer based in Paris, France who ❀️ #FOSS 🎬 Director of...
 ), @Sia Karamalegos, @Chee Aun πŸ€”, @Deane Barker You can sign up to WTN via email and/or follow [@feed](
Web Technology News
Web Technology News
Insights on the Web’s future β€” infrastructure, open networks, and AI. By Richard MacManus, pioneering tech blogger and founder of ReadWriteWeb.
 ) here on Mastodon.
For my 'one more thing' on WTN this week ( [@feed](
Web Technology News
Web Technology News
Insights on the Web’s future β€” infrastructure, open networks, and AI. By Richard MacManus, pioneering tech blogger and founder of ReadWriteWeb.
 ) ) I highlighted some lovely web community action from 2000. The image attached is from Anita Rowland's weblog that year, describing a meetup with fellow Seattle bloggers (2 legendary bloggers, @npub1prsj...eh8y and @npub19re3...ftse, were among them). It's a reminder that the web is all about human connection β€” and we should never forget that.
Web Technology News
WTN #7: Chrome Becomes an AI Browser, With Agents To Come
This week, we may have witnessed the beginning of the end for the traditional web browser. On Thursday, Google announced a raft of new AI features ...
 image
It’s happened: Google Chrome is now an AI browser https://thenewstack.io/chrome-switches-on-ai-the-future-of-browsing-begins-now/
I think of myself as an early adoptor on internet tech, but there is one technology I have never tried and never wish to, either: AirPods. I hate sticking things into my ears. I'm an 'over the ear' headphones guy and I don't see that changing. (p.s. I will probably add Meta's AR glasses to my 'never gonna use' list, but mainly because I have no desire to put Facebook on my face!)
Alright, buckle up internet history fans: we've come to the RSS Format Wars! The year 2000 was when RSS got forked into 2 different protocols: Dave Winer's RSS 0.92 and the RDF-based RSS 1.0. What's remarkable, looking back, is that the top bloggers of the day β€” Kottke, CamWorld, Rebecca Blood, Brad Graham, and others β€” still weren't using RSS by the end of that year. But they *were* building blogrolls.
Cybercultural
2000: Bloggers Make Friends, but RSS Format Wars Kick Off
In 2000, the blogroll becomes a trend as bloggers increasingly link to each other. Meanwhile, RSS bifurcates into two opposing formats: Dave Winer'...
 #InternetHistory #RSS
TBL on the founding of WHATWG, which now controls the HTML standard (clearly he was not a fan, at least initially). image
I’ve been re-watching this last couple of nights. Triumph of the Nerds, tv show from 1996 by Robert X Cringley. I also loved his book, Accidental Empires, on which the tv series is based. Such good production and he speaks to all the main players (Gates, Jobs, Woz, et al). I also discovered recently (via Wikipedia) that Cringely was a stage name, which I hadn’t realized before. I’m not sure what he is doing now…70-ish and maybe struggling, house burned down, etc.