If you’re a reader of The Next Web, chances are the internet is an important part of your life. However, do you remember the first website you ever visited?
I do. I was 17, it was 1996 and I was at college. Rumour spread around campus that a computer in the library had been fitted with a modem. Suddenly, this mythical ‘internet’ thing we’d heard so much about was coming our little corner of England.
My Media Studies teacher managed to somehow arrange for my class to be the first students to try out this much-hyped, but still a little expensive, technology. Getting to the front of the queue I thought hard about what website I wanted to visit. I didn’t have long, the library’s phoneline was being tied up with the connection and the college was being charged by the second. (more…)
Written on 25th June 2009
3 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
A law has been passed in Kazakhstan tightening control over the internet in a way which could restrict free speech.
Under the new law, chat rooms, blogs and public forums count as mass media, and therefore bloggers and individuals alike could break the law for expressing their opinions.
Gatherings and protests have taken place against the new law, many of which have been clamped down upon by the Kazakh government (more…)
Written on 6th June 2009
1 COMMENT Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
Creating a map of the entire internet would be a difficult task. It grows and changes by the minute so even trying would be pointless. Drawing a map of ‘your personal internet’ is a lot more straightforward. Wired magazine’s ‘Senior Maverick’ Kevin Kelly has asked over fifty people to draw a map of the internet as they see it and the results are, quite frankly, beautiful.
From simple spider diagrams of the sites people visit to a detailed map, complete with a ‘Pirate Bay’ by the sea and ‘The Cloud’ floating above, the results are varied and well worth browsing through.
Kevin is still looking for more submissions. You can find out more at his site and browse a gallery of the submissions at his Flickr account.
On a drawing book, Internet could be described as the flower of knowledge exploration, a place to explore mankind’s knowledge virtually, and contributing to that. What a useful contribution to our lives! However, our Internet is a lot less boring. After merely 36 years of development, Internet became the quick-fix for boredom at the office. Forget about knowledge, who doesn’t want to see a cute kitty or discuss breakup words to end your relationship?
In my opinion, there has been an staggering trend going on with the social media sites. While Slashdot is still (and probably always will be) moving along with it’s core crowd discussing tech, Digg grew from being a tech site, to… a tech site – adding images of cute little kitties and latest Failblog in the process. For quite some time, Twitter has been THE place to discuss, well… Twitter, a topic that merely expanded to ‘fail wales’ along the way. More recently, interesting contributions came along, which made the platform interesting, but in the post-Oprah Twitter-era, the network seems to have evolved to a place to discuss “lies girls tell” and “breakup words”.
Perhaps this observation is just me, but doesn’t it suck that these social networks are being ridiculed to pointless time wasters? Don’t even get me started on Facebooks “quiz” revolution (have you noticed that), or the amazing amount of useless content that Yahoo Answers is producing. I wonder if social networks lose a lot of their value due to deteriorating content that is published on them. Social Networks should (and Digg failed in this) facilitate new ways to present their data to their audience to keep the network interesting, otherwise, it is doomed to lose their audience on the long run.
Let me draw up the ‘evolution of topics’ for you, as I have experienced it:
Written on 29th May 2009
2 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Handed to KC in 1989 by the widow of a retired (IBM?) engineer. The model is a 1964 Livermore Data Systems “Model A” Acoustic Coupler Modem.
KC explains
“Even better than seeing it in a museum, I decide to hook the trusty Model A up and make it talk to something. After some trial and error, I manage to get it to talk to a terminal server at work and use it to connect to a linux box. It’s ALIVE! So, 45 years after it’s creation, this antique modem gets to send data to and from the modern Internet.”
Written on 13th March 2009
5 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Twenty years ago, a young unknown scientist called Tim Berners-Lee created a document titled “Information Management: A Proposal”. Berners-Lee, based out of a laboratory near Geneva at the time, had put together a – albeit rough – outline of what the World Wide Web is today.
Initially proposed to create a way for people to keep track of each other whilst working on major projects, little did the now Sir Tim Berners-Lee realise that the tools ambitions would prove fruitful on a GLOBAL scale.
Now based out of MIT and leading the World Wide Web Consortium, Sir Timothy plays a vital role in the web’s future development and standards. Today however, we hope he’s celebrating and has acknowledged, for at least a minute, how much of an impact he has really had. Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, we salute you.
Written on 10th March 2009
2 COMMENTS Srikanth AD, Web Designer, Search Engine Optimizer and Google Devotee
At The Next Web, we have an ongoing quest to make your digital life easier and more interesting by updating you regularly with startup reviews, useful software, and innovative internet tools and services.
Here is an experimental segment, we call it the Interestingness!. Here, we’ll cover intriguing articles from across the web which are ‘Hot wire’ and ‘Eye Catchers’.
Let us know your views about this new segment and feel free to share links to interesting articles you have come across in the comments. Just make sure it has interestingness!
You would think that the Internet would be mobile now. That all connections travel from east to west, and back, via satellites and radio waves. That isn’t how it works. The Internet is visible, tangible, breakable, and wet.
As you can see in this beautiful illustration (click it for a larger image!) the main continents are connected by less than 10cm thick Fiber Optic cables.
Those cables are generally 69 mm in diameter and weigh over 10.000 kilograms a kilometer. In deeper waters, lighter and less insulated cables are used. The capacity for these combined cables is more than 7 million bits per second.
That capacity is rarely used though. In general only 29% is in use. Of that 29% more than 70% is for Internet Traffic.
So, feel free to download more and bigger files from those transatlantic servers. The capacity is there so why not use it?
Written on 3rd July 2009
19 COMMENTS 
Written on 25th June 2009
A law has been passed in Kazakhstan tightening control over the internet in a way which could restrict free speech.
Written on 29th May 2009
Twenty years ago, a young unknown scientist called Tim Berners-Lee created a document titled “Information Management: A Proposal”. Berners-Lee, based out of a laboratory near Geneva at the time, had put together a – albeit rough – outline of what the World Wide Web is today.
Written on 10th March 2009
Written on 8th January 2009
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
