The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter - Страница 111

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As the Web was taking off in 1993–94, I was the editor of new media for Time Inc., in charge of the magazine company’s Internet strategy. Initially we had made deals with the dial-up online services, such as AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy. We supplied our content, marketed their services to our subscribers, and moderated chat rooms and bulletin boards that built up communities of members. For that we were able to command between one and two million dollars in annual royalties.

When the open Internet became an alternative to these proprietary online services, it seemed to offer an opportunity to take control of our own destiny and subscribers. At the April 1994 National Magazine Awards lunch, I had a conversation with Louis Rossetto, the editor and founder of Wired, about which of the emerging Internet protocols and finding tools—Gopher, Archie, FTP, the Web—might be best to use. He suggested that the best option was the Web because of the neat graphic capabilities being built into browsers such as Mosaic. In October 1994 both HotWired and a collection of Time Inc. websites launched.

At Time Inc. we experimented with using our established brands—Time, People, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated—as well as creating a new portal named Pathfinder. We also conjured up new brands, ranging from the Virtual Garden to the Netly News. Initially we planned to charge a small fee or subscription, but Madison Avenue ad buyers were so enthralled by the new medium that they flocked to our building offering to buy the banner ads we had developed for our sites. Thus we and other journalism enterprises decided that it was best to make our content free and garner as many eyeballs as we could for eager advertisers.

It turned out not to be a sustainable business model.⁵⁰ The number of websites, and thus the supply of slots for ads, went up exponentially every few months, but the total amount of advertising dollars remained relatively flat. That meant advertising rates eventually tumbled. It was also not an ethically healthy model; it encouraged journalists to cater primarily to the desires of their advertisers rather than the needs of their readers. By then, however, consumers had been conditioned to believe that content should be free. It took two decades to start trying to put that genie back in the bottle.

In the late 1990s Berners-Lee tried to develop a micropayments system for the Web through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which he headed. The idea was to devise a way to embed in a Web page the information needed to handle a small payment, which would allow different “electronic wallet” services to be created by banks or entrepreneurs. It was never implemented, partly because of the changing complexity of banking regulations. “When we started, the first thing we tried to do was enable small payments to people who posted content,” Andreessen explained. “But we didn’t have the resources at the University of Illinois to implement that. The credit card systems and banking system made it impossible. We tried hard, but it was so painful to deal with those guys. It was cosmically painful.”⁵¹

In 2013 Berners-Lee began reviving some of the activities of the W3C’s Micropayments Markup Working Group. “We are looking at micropayment protocols again,” he said. “It would make the Web a very different place. It might be really enabling. Certainly the ability to pay for a good article or song could support more people who write things or make music.”⁵² Andreessen said he hoped that Bitcoin,^III a digital currency and peer-to-peer payment system created in 2009, might turn out to be a model for better payment systems. “If I had a time machine and could go back to 1993, one thing I’d do for sure would be to build in Bitcoin or some similar form of cryptocurrency.”⁵³

We at Time Inc. and other media companies made one other mistake, I think: we abandoned our focus on creating community after we settled into the Web in the mid-1990s. On our AOL and CompuServe sites, much of our effort had been dedicated to creating communities with our users. One of the early denizens of The WELL, Tom Mandel, was hired to moderate Time’s bulletin boards and emcee our chat rooms. Posting articles from the magazine was secondary to creating a sense of social connection and community among our users. When we migrated to the Web in 1994, we initially tried to replicate that approach. We created bulletin boards and chat groups on Pathfinder and pushed our engineers to replicate AOL’s simple discussion threads.

But as time went on, we began to pay more attention to publishing our own stories online rather than creating user communities or enabling user-generated content. We and other media companies repurposed our print publications into Web pages to be passively consumed by our readers, and we relegated the discussions to a string of reader comments at the bottom of the page. These were often unmoderated rants and blather that few people, including us, ever read. Unlike the Usenet newsgroups or The WELL or AOL, the focus was not on discussions and communities and content created by users. Instead, the Web became a publishing platform featuring old wine—the type of content you could find in print publications—being poured into new bottles. It was like the early days of television, when the offerings were nothing more than radio shows with pictures. Thus we failed to thrive.

Fortunately, the street finds its own uses for things, and new forms of media soon arose to take advantage of the new technology. Led by the growth of blogs and wikis, both of which emerged in the mid-1990s, a revitalized Web 2.0 arose that allowed users to collaborate, interact, form communities, and generate their own content.

JUSTIN HALL AND HOW WEB LOGS BECAME BLOGS

As a freshman at Swarthmore College in December 1993, Justin Hall picked up a stray copy of the New York Times in the student lounge and read a story by John Markoff about the Mosaic browser. “Think of it as a map to the buried treasures of the Information Age,” it began. “A new software program available free to companies and individuals is helping even novice computer users find their way around the global Internet, the network of networks that is rich in information but can be baffling to navigate.”⁵⁴ A willowy computer geek with an impish smile and blond hair flowing over his shoulders, Hall seemed to be a cross between Huck Finn and a Tolkien elf. Having spent his childhood in Chicago dialing into computer bulletin boards, he immediately downloaded the browser and began surfing. “The whole concept blew me away,” he remembered.⁵⁵

Hall quickly realized something: “Nearly all of the online publishing efforts were amateur, people who didn’t have anything to say.” So he decided to create a website, using an Apple PowerBook and MacHTTP software he downloaded for free, that would amuse himself and others who shared his cheeky outlook and teenage obsessions. “I could put my writings and words up electronically, make them look pretty, and engage the web with links.”⁵⁶ He got his site up in mid-January 1994, and a few days later, to his delight, strangers from around the Web began to stumble across it.

His first home page had a tone of mischievous intimacy. It included a photo of Hall mugging behind Colonel Oliver North, another of Cary Grant taking acid, and a sincere shout-out to “Al Gore, the information tollroad’s first official pedestrian.” The tone was conversational. “Howdy,” the home page declared. “This is twenty-first century computing. Is it worth our patience? I’m publishing this, and I guess you’re readin’ this, in part to figure that out, huh?”

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