New Podcast: “The Web Behind”
I’m really excited to announce that I’ll be launching a new podcast series called “The Web Behind” with Jen Simmons of The Web Ahead—in fact, The Web Behind will be an in-stream subset of The Web Ahead. We talk about it briefly on The Web Ahead #34, which was released earlier this afternoon.
On The Web Behind, we’ll be interviewing people who were involved in the evolution of the web from its early days, getting their perspectives on why certain things did or didn’t happen and how those outcomes have affected the web’s development. Many guests will be people who have since left the web field, or who have vastly different roles now than they did 10-15 years ago. Our first guest will be John Allsopp, and we’re scheduled to record live at 2300 UTC on Thursday, September 20th, with the resulting podcast episode available shortly thereafter. We plan to have a new Web Behind episode about once every other week, schedules permitting.
One of my primary goals is to augment the work of the Web History CG with the personal stories and perspectives of the people who witnessed and quite often influenced the web and web design and development. In many ways our conceptual model is folklore.org, though we aren’t (yet) planning to create a standalone site like that. Maybe one day! First we need to build up a library of interviews.
We have our first few guests lined up and many more on a “wish list”, but I would love to hear suggestions from the Community Group regarding who we should have on. I’ll say right away that I hope to one day have both Sir Tim and Robert Caillau as guests, but we’re very much interested in hearing other names. We want to bring forward voices who are unfamiliar to current web professionals, and would be thrilled to have on guests unfamiliar even to us.
I’m really looking forward to hearing what our guests have to tell us, and I hope you’ll join us!
This sounds very exciting.
I suppose you can start with the CERN staff. Then the people who wrote the first browsers, etc. Clicking away from the WWW Wikipedia page should lead to obvious candidates.
One could also imagine going before the early days of the Web, and talk to people who either influenced Tim, directly or not. You could go as far back as Paul Otlet. He’s long dead, of course, but you could interview the Mundaneum folks. Or you could also talk to people involved in projects that were eventually killed by the Web, like Gopher, France’s Minitel, etc.