- One 40-year-old looks back on the Internet, c. 1971
- 1972: ELIZA, IANA and the search for (in)finite attention online
- 7 rules for rule-breakers
- Waiting for your life online
- How my custom URL shortener taught me the 10 principles of tech support
- Dittos remind us of the pleasures of obsolescence
- 10 ways you can help to build the Internet
- 10 ways spam taught us to focus our attention
- 6 questions to prepare you for a social media crisis
- Picturing the Internet in 1981
- 6 ways to beat time zones with technology
- 25 rules of social media netiquette
- Honoring the debt Canada’s connectivity owes to Chinese workers
- Cut the cord
- Core tenets of the social web
- Quiz: What level of online security is right for you?
- Online innovators turn foresight into insight
- Finding the soul of the web in HTML
- What you choose when you choose a network
- Blacksburg reminds us how to worry about our kids
- Are you using the Internet to monetize or to enlighten?
- Real innovators don’t hold grudges
- 10 bloggers share their tips on how to stay motivated
- 6 resources for learning about Internet history
- Looking back to predict the future of the Internet
- Creative disobedience online, from DeCSS to tweettheresults
- 6 web technologies that don’t suck anymore
- What we can learn from delicious and the tagging revolution
- 8 ways writers can make the most of online video
- The Lonely Princess: A Social Media Fairy Tale
- Why we need to remember life before the Internet
- The 9 secrets of a successful marriage (to a web application like Evernote)
- Bing helps us search for the meaning in our tech choices
- 8 browser extensions that will make you more productive
- 7 lessons about our online future from our online past
- Why do moms have to choose between usability and openness?
- Search party: 10 tips for better searching on Google and beyond
- Custom URL shorteners put the poetry back in domain names
- 40 tips on how to make the most of your life online
“Free, open and participatory” is the social web’s equivalent to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
That’s what I argue in the latest installment of One 40-year-old, which appears today on the Harvard Business Review site. My latest post looks at a 1987 controversy over the structure of Usenet (news groups), known as the Great Renaming. All those years ago, you could see the principles that would shape today’s social web:
It should come as no surprise that we expect the web to be free, open and participatory: after all, these are words that are widely bandied about in discussions of social media best practices and business 2.0. But it’s crucial to recognize that these principles are no passing fad, invented by us as a result of some Facebook spat or Verizon business decision. Nor are they the high hopes of a new and idealistic medium. In fact, they’re the same principles that have always bubbled to the surface on the social Web, even a quarter-century ago with the Great Renaming.
You can read more about how these principles played out in 1987, and how they’re playing out today, in The Core Tenets of the Social Web, 25 years in the making.
Recent Comments