The Rise and Fall of Early Digital Media

In this episode, I explore the history and evolution of digital media— from the dot come bubble, to blogging, to personality-driven media brands like Buzzfeed, and now to citizen journalism on platforms like TikTok and YouTube. I look at how the quest for information online went from active to passive, largely thanks to the introduction of algorithms and Big Tech's obsession with finding The Next Revolutionary Thing, and end by questioning the impact that AI will have on the industry.

Timestamps:

3:00 The rise of domain names & URLs

5:56 Dot com bubble & burst 

8:38 The rise of search engines

10:00 History of blogging

14:13 How blogging & personality-driven content impacted digital media

15:14 The Buzzfeed revolution

18:00 The Try Guys

18:43 Ladylike

19:17 Tasty

19:52 Buzzfeed Unsolved

20:57 News aggregators & citizen journalism

22:42 The AI boom

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Sources:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/04/domain-names-obsolete/678000/ 

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-yahoo-is-good-but-may-get-worse/ 

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2000/dec/30/internetnews.business 

https://www.wired.com/2014/12/da-bom/ 

https://nymag.com/news/media/15971/ 

https://www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0009693/#:~:text=Summary,later%20becoming%20a%20group%20blog. 

https://medium.com/the-business-of-content/how-boing-boing-adapted-to-the-social-web-e6c2e4008e46 

https://www.fastcompany.com/1702167/inside-wild-wacky-profitable-world-boing-boing 

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/hogan-thiel-gawker-trial/554132/ 

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/mar/06/hulk-hogan-gawker-lawsuit-first-amendment-trial 

https://gizmodo.com/this-is-how-gizmodo-started-5934312 

https://www.wired.com/story/buzzfeed/ 

https://nymag.com/news/features/buzzfeed-2013-4/ 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/28/business/media/ben-smith-buzzfeed-new-york-times.html 

https://centennialworld.com/the-try-guys-ned-fulmer-cheating/ 

https://www.tubefilter.com/2019/05/24/tasty-long-form-making-it-big/ 

https://www.reuters.com/markets/echoes-dotcom-bubble-haunt-ai-driven-us-stock-market-2024-07-02/ 

https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-internet-dotcom-bubble-tech-stocks-nvidia-market-crash-gordon-2024-5 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-31/three-big-differences-between-the-ai-and-dot-com-bubbles 

https://www.wired.com/story/dial-up-phil-lewis/ https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-web#:~:text=Where%20the%20Web%20was%20born,and%20institutes%20around%20the%20world. 

https://gizmodo.com/what-did-people-use-before-google-to-search-the-web-1843750339