Internet History Podcast

As most of you know, I’m busy writing a book that this podcast is partially source material for, and at the moment, I’m deep in the weeds on chapters about the Dotcom bubble—how it happened, why it happened, that sort of thing. By necessity, I’ve been going into a lot of economic background for the bubble, and in the course of doing so, the famous chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, keeps coming up. So, today’s episode is a bit of an analysis episode as I speak with Sebastian Mallaby, who is the author of THE definitive biography of Greenspan, a book called The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan. Listen along with me as I try to get a sense of the role the Fed chairman played in setting the table for the dotcom bubble.The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

SummarySometimes you get to talk to your actual heroes. I've been reading Richard MacManus probably almost as long as he's been writing on the web. He is the founder of the popular ReadWriteWeb blog, and he was one of the forces behind the Web 2.0 movement that was so influential in my career as a web entrepreneur. Here's another story of the accidental professionalization of blogging, from one of the pioneers.Richard is a science fiction writer now! Buy his book Presence! It's about the future of VR!PS: My TED Talk can be found here.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

 SummaryAt the dawn of e-commerce, if Amazon.com staked a claim in books, and sites like CDNow staked a claim in music, then Reel.com should be remembered as the important dot-com era player in movie retail. But more than just going toe to toe with Amazon, Reel.com actually pioneered online movie rental as well. Reel.com's founder, Stewart Skorman, actually came from the world of video rental stores, and sold his video chain to Blockbuster. So the first site to rent you movies via the postal service? Reel.com. And more importantly, the site that really pioneered movie matching technology, that art/science of recommending which movie you're really going to want to watch tonight? Reel.com.Stuart's exceptional memoir/entrepreneur's handbook is called Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur: Why I Can't Stop Starting Over  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

If you’ll remember back to the chapter episode on the early search engines and Yahoo, I said that it’s hard to pin down exactly what the “first search engine” was. There were so many competing projects and technologies that launched in different ways at different times. One potential candidate is the World Wide Web Worm, which is criminally undercovered by the histories out there. The World Wide Web Worm was developed by Oliver McBryan, at the University of Colorado at Boulder in late 1993. It grew out of an early directory site for web content that McBryan also launched, a sort of Yahoo before Yahoo.   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

SummaryMost of you know Chamath Palihapitiya as one of the most prominent and progressive venture capitalists working today. But before forming Social Capital, Chamath was an early employee at a startup we've already covered, WinAmp; was the head of AOL's Instant Messenger product; and of course, was an early employee at Facebook.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Most of you will know Jason Calacanis from his many high profile endeavors such as his podcasts (especially This Week in Startups) his Launch conference and Inside.com. But older listeners will remember Jason as one of the most colorful personalities of the dot-com era in New York, as the publisher of Silicon Alley Reporter. And Jason also played a key role in forming the modern media landscape as the founder of Weblogs Inc. We talk about all of that much more.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

SUMMARYI missed it (I should really be keeping a calendar of these things) but Slate.com celebrated its 20th anniversary last month. If you’ll recall, we went into some detail about Slate’s founding in this chapter episode, but today we have Slate’s current Editor in Chief, Julia Turner, and a former Editor and current Chairman of the Slate Group, Jacob Weisberg, on the pod to discuss the history of Slate and the contributions Slate made to the evolution of digital media on the web.   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

John Rossman helped transform Amazon.com’s business. After the dotcom bubble burst, Amazon delved into a new business line that allowed third parties to do business off of Amazon’s platform, and make use of Amazon’s many competencies. In this Episode, John describes his role developing the Amazon 3rd party marketplace and gives us his perspective on what makes Amazon successful. John’s book about Amazon is called The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Lessons Behind the World’s Most Disruptive Company. If you want to understand Amazon on a deeper level, I highly encourage you to check it out.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Jonathan Abrams was the founder of the first modern social networking site, Friendster. This is essentially the story of the birth of social media… the ideas that inspired the very notion of social networking, the struggles to launch a web startup after the dotcom bubble burst, the challenges of suddenly becoming the hottest startup in the world, and the eventual battles with MySpace and Facebook for social as we know it today.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

If you'll remember a few years ago I spoke with Rod Canion about how Compaq created the industry standard computer platform that finally supplanted IBM. Well, this week, on September 16, a new documentary about the Compaq story, called Silicon Cowboys, is coming to theaters, On Demand and various rental and streaming services like iTunes, Google Play and Amazon Video. So, we spoke briefly with the director of the film, Jason Cohen. Find out more about where the movie is showing and view the trailer here.The film will be opening in theaters this Friday in the following cities..New York, NY Pasadena, CA Santa Monica, CA San Jose, CA Houston, TX Columbus, OH Chicago, IL San Francisco, CA Grapevine, TX South Miami, FL Phoenix, AZ Westminster, CO Cherry Hill, NJ Arlington, MA  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I originally wanted to talk to Mike Slade about Starwave, the innovative company that launched some major names onto the web, including ESPN.com, ABCNews.com, MrShowbiz.com, and after an eventual sale to Disney, put together the pieces that eventually became the Go.com portal play. But Mike is one of those guys who has had such a varied and interesting career, I couldn't help but go into other eras of his career. The dude worked at Microsoft in the early 1980s. He worked at NeXT in the early 90s. And from 1998 through 2004 he was Special Assistant to Steve Jobs as he saved Apple as a company, launched the iPod and kicked into motion the modern gadget era.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We've spoken a lot on this show about Netscape and the "Browser Wars," but there's a key angle to this story that we haven't had the chance to delve into yet. While Netscape was out in California creating Navigator, there was another company, Spyglass, that had licensed Mosaic's browser code and was attempting to build a business around web browsers at the exact same time. Spyglass helped bring browsers to market before Netscape did, and even went public before Netscape's famous IPO. And one more thing? Internet Explorer was developed as a competitor to Netscape Navigator because Spyglass did a deal with Microsoft. Douglas Colbeth was a co-founder and CEO of Spyglass, and in this episode, he gives us all the background and fascinating details surrounding the opening salvoes of the Browser Wars.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

SummaryJoel Johnson has spent nearly his entire professional career, working in digital media. He went from being an anonymous online commenter to being an early editor of Gizmodo, to eventually becoming editorial director of Gawker Media. Essentially, Joel was there from the very beginning when blogging began to "go pro" and evolved into modern media as we know it today. Joel recounts the history of the blogging "industry," Gawker Media especially, and gives us his own perspective on where digital media has been, and where it might be going.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

SummarySteve Sasson was the inventor of the world's first digital camera. Because it's hard to imagine modern life without digital photography, it's maybe easy to forget what a marvel it really is. And Sasson has been front and center for the entire digital photography revolutions. In this episode, he recounts for us the sort of skunkworks project that led to the first digital camera, recalls the long gestation the technology had within the company that developed it, Kodak, and toward the end, we get into a fascinating examination of technology disruption itself, for which Kodak is often held up as a poster-child, in terms of innovation challenges in the digital era.You can see Steven demo the first digital camera in this brief video:Inventor Portrait: Steven SassonPhotos of the original camera here and here.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Quick, special announcement of a book, based on the podcast, coming from Liveright (W.W. Norton) in 2018. Regular episode to come next monday...  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

SummaryJeff Wilkins was the co-founder and first CEO of CompuServe, perhaps the original consumer online service. Jeff recounts for us CompuServe's founding in 1970, the launch of it's consumer-facing service in 1980, and all of the innovations that CompuServe brought to life: the first commercial email product; the first newspapers online; the first airline listings; and most interestingly, CB Simulator, the grandaddy of all chat apps in the world. We even revisit the famous AOL CD carpet-bombing campaign from a new angle, and Jeff shares his insights about how and why AOL was able to become the dominant online service of the 90s.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Special Note: We’re testing something new this week. You can read a full transcription of this episode here.Everyone’s favorite, friendly neighborhood Venture Capitalist, Hunter Walk, discusses four amazing segments of his career: Late Night With Conan O’Brien, Second Life, Google Adsense and YouTube.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

SummaryKen and Roberta Williams were the founders of the legendary PC gaming company Sierra Online. Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media and Communication at Georgia Tech, Laine Nooney, joins the show to discuss the history and legacy of Sierra Online. You can find out more about Laine's work at her website, LaineNooney.com and by following her on Twitter at Sierra_OffLine.Pictures of Ken and Roberta Williams: Picture 1 Picture 2 A screencap from King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne A screencap from Kings Quest V A screencap from Leisure Suit Larry  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Mark Selcow and Matt Glickman were the founders of BabyCenter.com. The story of BabyCenter is a combination of several themes we've discussed on this show: creating community as a strategy for building a sustainable audience, attempting e-commerce in the 1990s, and, most interestingly, we get into an in-depth discussion of their experiences of the DotCom bubble.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

SummaryLarry Kramer was the founder of MarketWatch.com. He’s also been the President and Publisher of USA Today and he’s currently interim CEO of TheStreet.com. We talk to him about creating a brand like MarketWatch in a space dominated by powerful incumbents like The Wall Street Journal, CNBC and others. But we also hear what it was like to work in the legendary Washington Post newsroom in the 1970s and 80s, as well as what it takes to bring success to modern media properties like USA Today in the digital era. If you want a first hand primer of when digital and old-world media collided, you couldn’t do better than to listen to the career path of Larry Kramer.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.