What the Internet Was Like in 2003

What the Internet Was Like in 2003 Blogging goes mainstream in 2003; and with the launch of Google AdSense, pro blogs emerge too. Also the iTunes store debuts, social networks ramp up, and Flash websites are everywhere. Flash at full volume: Jamiroquai’s website in 2003. By 2003, the internet had weathered the worst of the dot-com crash and developers and entrepreneurs were beginning to come out of hibernation. While it would take another year for Silicon Valley to start inflating another bubble - this one would be named "Web 2.0" - there was a renewed sense of optimism. Blogging and RSS moved into the mainstream in 2003, helped by the emergence of consumer-friendly RSS Readers like NetNewsWire and Bloglines. There was even now an economic model for blogging, with the launch of Google's AdSense in March. Also, online music went legit with Apple's iTunes store, and social networking began to take recognizable form with Friendster and MySpace. " Social software " was a geeky term being used in the blogosphere during this time. So there was an understanding that social aspects would underpin the next web era, even if the tech industry hadn't yet put all the pieces together. Clay Shirky explaining "social software" in Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 newsletter; May 2003. Blogging Goes Mainstream If there was one company that was putting together the jigsaw puzzle that would later be named Web 2.0, it was Google. In February, Google acquired the leading blogging service of the day: Blogger. “Google, which runs the Web's premier search site, has purchased Pyra Labs, a San Francisco company that created some of the earliest technology for writing weblogs, the increasingly popular personal and opinion journals,” wrote Silicon Valley reporter Dan Gillmor on February 15, 2003 . Blogger homepage, July 2003. Needless to say, Google's purchase brought blogging even more into the mainstream. Other blogging tools, such as Movable Type, Radio Userland and LiveJournal, gained popularity over 2003 too. Meanwhile, there was also a revolution happening in reading software. RSS Readers (sometimes called "news aggregators") were increasingly being used. Two examples were FeedDemon and NetNewsWire - these were desktop readers, for Windows and Mac respectively. Then in mid-2003, a browser-based RSS Reader called Bloglines launched; by August I was a Bloglines user and have used browser-based readers ever since. Bloglines homepage, July 2003. People used these new reader apps to subscribe to blogs, via a fast-growing open standard called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). RSS became a crucial part of the blogging movement over 2003 , because it enabled bloggers to be discovered and their content to be distributed across the internet. AdSense and Pro Blogs In addition to buying Blogger, Google was starting to figure out its business model. The company had only recently begun to turn a profit, thanks to its AdWords online advertising platform - introduced in 2000 . But when the company launched a contextual advertising system in March , we began to see why blogging was of such interest to...

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