One of the Web's greatest benefits (particularly to a site's audio editor!) has been the painless distribution of media. It's easier now than ever before to disseminate your music, movies and pictures, and our choices for this section highlight the road online consumer media has taken.
MP3 is probably the most common format for music on the internet, and has been hugely popular for over a decade. It fuelled the digital music revolution, it's the codec behind YouTube videos, it saturates P2P networks and it's now the must-use format for DRM-free digital music downloads. This ancient patent marked its public arrival.
Radio HK, founded by Norman Hajjar, was the first full-time, internet-only radio station that began by broadcasting music from unsigned and independent bands. It's estimated the station reached 100,000 people in 46 countries and held a trial licence from ASCAP, making it a pioneer for instigating the legitimate broadcasting of internet music.
Just a month after being created and two months before getting its first funding, 18-year-old Sean Fanning's Napster application enabled the first of billions of MP3s to be passed over its service. It was instrumental in the internet permanently changing the music industry.
Once the first BitTorrent client — written by the protocol's inventor, Bram Cohen — was released (initially in July 2001, but in a usable public state in October 2002), it was only a matter of time before the application, its variants and associated websites changed the face of global media distribution. BitTorrent is generally free to use and ridiculously efficient.
YouTube ushered in the era of Flash-based video and global Web-based video sharing. Founded by three ex-PayPal employees and acquired for $1.6bn by Google in 2006, YouTube has been at the front of the Web-based video revolution. Despite criticism of its low-quality videos, it hosted the first official online American Democratic presidential debate.
It's no secret that the internet isn't just about sending email, reading the news and searching for hilarious photos of well-proportioned ladies wearing occasion-specific headgear — useful utilities, archives, stores and tools exist online, too. We've examined five extremely important ones, the first of which highlights the branding significance of Web domains.
One of the most valuable domains ever created, Sex.com went through a years-long battle for ownership shortly following the birth of the modern Web, after it was stolen from its owner, Gary Kremen, earning the thief tens of millions of dollars. The case highlighted how lucrative domains and Web business could be, even in the early days.
Brewster Kahle created the Internet Archive after inventing the Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) system in 1989. His goal for the IA was to archive the websites, text, images, video and audio contained within the entire internet, and to make it universally available — for free — to everyone, for ever.
Co-founder of Sun Microsystems Andy Bechtolsheim cut Google a $100,000 cheque in this month, just a decade ago. He was the first outside investor in the search giant which, at the time, wasn't even a legal entity. Two weeks later it was, as Google Technology Inc, and the rest is history.
A pin was about to pop the dotcom bubble as SourceForge.net — a free repository for open-source code, projects and applications — opened its doors. Not being over-ambitious, it survived amid financial difficulties and now hosts over 150,000 open-source projects within a 1.9 million-strong community of worldwide developers and groups.
With just 200,000 songs but all major record labels on board, Apple's iTunes Music Store launched and became the first Web store to sell major-label music legally for download. The software initially only ran on the Mac, but it allowed purchased songs to be played on iPods and it sold over a quarter of a million songs within 24 hours.
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So, did you zdnet journos cut your teeth at one of murdoch's tabloids? If Rob McCool developed the Http daemon in the mid-70s then he was a child genius. Simply look him up on wikipedia and you'll see he was born in 1973. Plus, if he did write it in the mid-70s why isn't he the so-called "father of the web" - I', surprised you lot haven't changed history and decided gates invented the internet - muppets!