DARPA, the military agency behind the early Internet is 50 years old this year, and the World Wide Web now well into its teens at 15 years old. The actual birth date of the Web is hotly debated online, but the one I am going by is 30th April 1993, which was the day that CERN announced that their web code was in the public domain. By relinquishing all property rights and granting permission for anyone to use, duplicate, modify, and redistribute their code, the free, open World Wide Web was born. DARPA, the military agency behind the early Internet is 50 years old this year, and the World Wide Web now well into its teens at 15 years old. The actual birth date of the Web is hotly debated online, but the one I am going by is 30th April 1993, which was the day that CERN announced that their web code was in the public domain. By relinquishing all property rights and granting permission for anyone to use, duplicate, modify, and redistribute their code, the free, open World Wide Web was born.The Web was a mere stripling when I first saw it on screen, and the second time I played with a new search engine called Webcrawler back in early 1994. The first thing I searched for was Pingu websites and was delighted to find not only images and clips, but people talking about their love for the little penguin cartoon character.

I was entranced with this network of people and information, and before long I was online at home on my first dial up account with a pre-Pentium PC and 28,800 modem. The Web was a dark place in those days with garish blues, reds and yellows against black backgrounds. It still looked much like the early games I played on my BBC Basic in the 1980s, like Pac Man. Directories like Yahoo were in vogue, and when Google launched in 1997 it brought a breath of fresh air to web design. Suddenly there was simplicity & space, and best of all you could find the information you were really looking for without wading through pages of irrelevance.

The first wave of web development that kicked off in 1993 started to really excite me around the turn of the Millennium. By then I was confident that I could move from Europe to New Zealand and continue to telework through web tools and email. Over seven years later and we are seeing the the second web wave, which has mostly been built by geeks who left big companies due to burnout or redundancy. Many of us have found that we can have a lot more fun working for ourselves or for social enterprises that care about more than just the bottom line. Many have found success without selling out their ethics, and Google could probably buy New Zealand if it wanted to. The geeks are inheriting the earth, but luckily they mostly follow the geek creed, which is make a comfortable and sustainable living, then try and make the world a better place.

Many are serial social entrepreneurs, like the speakers at the annual Tech Hui webcast to Kiwi schools, and the mentors I met at the Wellington XMedia Lab. The Web has brought us together, and allowed us to share ideas, wisdom and experiences. We are all neighbours now and have friends a planet away who think, love and laugh like we do. Never before have so many minds been connected without having to increase our carbon footprint, which is great for saving our precious environment. However there is still a long way to go, and digital pioneer Sir Tim Berners Lee believes the web is still in it's infancy:

"What's exciting is that people are building new social systems, new systems of review, new systems of governance. My hope is that those will produce... new ways of working together
effectively and fairly which we can use globally to manage ourselves as
a planet."

Soon the web will be on every mobile handset, and most homes/offices will have gaming interfaces & spaces for running virtual workspaces. People will embrace Cloud Computing once broadband become fast, cheap and stable, and together we can come up with solutions for all the world's problems. So Happy Birthday to the World Wide Web, and thanks for all the knowledge and friends you have brought me in the last 15 years!

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As well as being TBI's strategist, Helen Baxter a.k.a. MsBehaviour runs dance-music label TMet Recordings, 3D animation company Mohawk Media and has a fortnightly slot on National Radio called 'Virtual World'.

12/06/08