Claude Shannon, Father of Information Theory
Summary: Claude Shannon was a mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as “the father of information theory.” In the pantheon of cool people who made …
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December 13, 2022 The del.icio.us Story With Joshua Schachter
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June 16, 2019 Inventor of the Hashtag, Chris Messina
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May 18, 2019 Google, Twitter and More With Karen Wickre
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May 4, 2019 Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott
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October 28, 2018 The Google Story with Matt Cutts @mattcutts
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Most Recent Podcasts
The Godfather of Streaming Music, Robert Reid
Summary: Robert Reid, the founder of Rhapsody, can be considered the Godfather (founding father?) of the streaming music reality we now live in. But guess what? …
Kottke.org’s Jason Kottke, @jkottke
Summary: Jason Kottke, of kottke.org fame, was one of the early bloggers, one of the first bloggers to go pro, and one of the few …
The History of Java with Todd Sundsted
Summary: People have been yelling at me for years that I’ve not covered more technical aspects of the web’s history, especially things like Java. Specifically …
NYTimes Technology Columnist Farhad Manjoo
Summary: Today, a man who needs no introduction: New York Times Technology Columnist Farhad Manjoo. This episode was recorded about two months or so ago, …
Amazon, Hulu and Oculus with Eugene Wei
Summary: No joke, this is one of my favorite episodes we’ve ever done. Eugene Wei was an early employee at Hulu, so we get some …
Claire L. Evans, Author of Broad Band- The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet
Summary: Claire Evans is the author of the new book: Broad Band The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet. This is the …
The History of Online Video with JibJab’s Gregg Spiridellis
Summary: Gregg Spiridellis has been making things go viral on the web since before the term VIRAL was even a thing. His company, JibJab has …
Venrock’s David Pakman on Apple’s Music Group, N2K, eMusic and Dollar Shave Club
Summary: David Pakman is a well respected venture capitalist at Venrock, but also a lifelong musician and music fan. Earlier in his career he played …
Jeff Bussgang on Open Market and Early eCommerce
Summary: It gets my goat that these days, the history of ecommerce begins and ends with Amazon. There were so many companies and big ideas …
The Forgotten Story of PLATO, with Brian Dear
Summary: Plato was an online and interactive learning computer system developed in the 1960s at the University of Illinois. But in the early 1970s, Plato …
Bob Stein of Voyager and The Criterion Collection
Summary: Bob Stein was the founder of Voyager, publisher of the first consumer CDROM titles, and, far and away the leader of the CDROM industry …
Rob Malda (@cmdrtaco) on SlashDot and Social Media
Summary: You might know him as Rob Malda, or you might know him as CmdrTaco, but he was the founder of the great geek social …
Dave Winer on The Open Web, Blogging, Podcasting and More
Summary: Dave Winer has been called the godfather of a lot of things. The godfather of blogging. The Godfather of Podcasting. One of the key …
Giphy with Nicole LaPorte
Summary: Nicole Laporte has a cover story in Fast Company magazine this month about Giphy, potentially the next big story in online advertising and marketing, …
Om Malik on Blogging and Web2.0
Summary: Om Malik is, of course, a legend. One of the first journalists on the “tech beat” in the 1990s, one of the first bloggers to …
The Story of the AOL/Time Warner Merger
Summary: What is generally considered the worst merger of all time, and certainly the crescendo event of the dotcom bubble era, today we take a …
David Shen on Early Yahoo and the Maturation of Online Advertising
Summary: David Shen was employee #17 at Yahoo, where he eventually had a hand in, not only the birth of advertising as the primary business …
Facebook’s First Senior Software Engineer, Karel Baloun
Summary: Karel Baloun was the first senior software engineer hired at Facebook in 2005. This was after the Accel round of funding, when Facebook truly …
Ryan Mac on Soundcloud
Summary: Just as last week’s episode posted, another great piece about SoundCloud was posted on Buzzfeed by the great Ryan Mac. So, in a rare …
Blog Posts
How Teens Spent Time On The Web In 1999
More data goodness from my deep dives into The Industry Standard’s hard copy archives. In 1999, Jupiter Communications estimated there were only about 8 million …
Nostalgia For Dot-Com Era Valuations?
Was in the library today doing research for upcoming episodes. Was going through the entire print run of Industry Standard magazine, page by page. Stumbled …
Is There A Tool That Triggers A Phone Alert Via RSS?
I’m waiting feverishly for the latest Ask the Maester column to go live on Grantland. Sooo… so many questions about that last episode and the …
What Was The First Item Ever Ordered On Amazon?
John Wainwright Was Amazon’s First Ever Customer Amazon.com was actually founded all the way back in the summer of 1994. But unlike other dotcom-era startups …
On the 20th Anniversary – The History of Yahoo’s Founding
Yahoo was officially incorporated on March 2nd, 1995. This is a partial transcript of several episodes of the Internet History Podcast, including an oral history …
Amazon’s Office Layout Circa 1996?
Here’s a fun little nugget. It’s from Erica Jorgensen, who was the Health Books editor at Amazon. This is a neat tie-in to recent …
Requiem For Radio Shack
So, RadioShack is dead, huh? You might say, who cares? Probably little better (different?) than a Sprint store anyway, right? Before there were hackers who …
The Change In Marketshare For Game Platforms Going Back To 1971
No real reason to post this. Just thought it was cool. Click to enlarge. Found it here.
End of Year Checkin With iTunes
On yesterdays ep. I thanked you for keeping us high in the iTunes lists. But I realized I hadn’t actually checked on that in a …
The Real Reason Excite Turned Down Buying Google For $750,000 In 1999
It’s an infamous story of Internet history as well as business lore, but in 1999, the search engine Excite.com—then running number two to the reigning champion …