Brian McCullough, who runs Internet History Podcast, also wrote a book named How The Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone which did a fantastic job of capturing the ethos of the early web and telling the backstory of so many people & projects behind it's evolution.
I think the quote which best the magic of the early web is
It has been a while since Google has had a major algorithm update.
They recently announced one which began on the 12th of March.
Google's original breakthrough in search was placing weight on links & using them to approximate the behavior of web users.
The abstract ofThe PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web reads
Probably the single best video to watch to understand the power of Google & Facebook (or even most of the major problems across society) is this following video about pleasure versus happiness.
In constantly seeking pleasure we forego happiness.
The "feed" based central aggregation networks are just like slot machines in your pocket: variable reward circuitry which self-optimizes around exploiting your flaws to eat as much attention as possible.
Grist
Much like publishers, employees at the big tech monopolies can end up little more than grist.
Products & product categories come & go, but even if you build "the one" you still may lose everything in the process.
Wrastlin With The News
The current presidential cabinet includes a WWE co-founder & this passes for modern political discourse:
Recently rank checker started hanging on some search queries & the button on the SEO Toolbar which launched rank checker stopped working. Both of these issues should now be fixed if you update your Firefox extensions.
If ever the toolbar button doesn't work one can enable the Menu bar in Firefox, then go under the tools menu to the rank checker section to open it.
Years ago we created a new logo for rank checker which we finally got around to changing it today. :)
Last August I wrote a blog post about how attention merchants were sucking the value out of online publishing. In it I noted how the Yahoo! Directory disappeared & how even DMOZ saw a sharp drop in traffic & rankings over the past few years.
The concept of a neutral web is dead. In its place is agenda-driven media.
There may be a couple exceptions which prove the rule, but new TLDs are generally an awful investment for everyone except the registry operator.
Here is the short version...
Imagine registering a domain for $10, building a business on it, and then learning the renewal fee will increase to hundreds of $ a year.— Elliot Silver (@DInvesting) March 7, 2017
When Compete.com launched with credits-based pricing well over a decade ago I felt like a kid in a candy store using their competitive research tool. Recently Compete.com announced they were shutting down, but many of the link analysis & competitive research tools which leverage scraping have also started licensing clickstream data from sources like Clickstre.am & JumpShot.
