A look back at Web25

2015-5-19 // by Ian Jacobs

On 12 March 2014 the World Wide Web Foundation (WF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced the launch of this site as a shared space to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Web and raise awareness about key challenges ahead. We received thousands of birthday greetings from around the world. We’ve highlighted a few of our favorites. The… Read more ›

The Web at 25: Reflections From Germany

2014-12-15 // by Dillon Mann

This year, we invited citizens from around the globe to reflect on the Web at 25, and share their hopes for the future of the Web. The Federal Foreign Office of Germany prepared a short film on the topic, asking ordinary Germans for their views on the Web at 25. We’re delighted to share the film here. … Read more ›

W3C Announces Program, Opens Registration for 20th Anniversary Symposium

2014-6-18 // by Ian Jacobs

W3C today announced the program and opened registration for W3C20 Anniversary Symposium: The Future of the Web, which takes place 29 October in Santa Clara, California. Confirmed speakers are: Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the Web and W3C Director Vinton Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google Fadi Chehadé, Chief Executive Officer of ICANN David-Michel Davies, Executive… Read more ›

WWW2014 Panel: What will the Web be like in another 25 years?

2014-6-4 // by Wendy Hall

The following remarks from Prof. Dame Wendy Hall, University of Southampton refer to a panel on WWW: The next 25 years that took place in April at the World Wide Web Conference 2014 in Seoul, Korea. When the hypermedia community first started talking about the Web as a concept and started to think about what it might become, few of us (perhaps… Read more ›

Reflections on the Web at 25 in Africa

2014-5-21 // by Dillon Mann

Writing for The Guardian, Dr Bitange Ndemo, former permanent secretary of communications in Kenya, and chairperson of the Alliance for Affordable Internet, has shared his thoughts on the Web’s impact in Africa over the past 25 years.  Here’s an excerpt from the piece:  “Young people are leveraging broadband to innovate. Less than 10 years ago, you would not… Read more ›

Tapping Collective Intelligence

2014-5-19 // by The Webbys

In November of 2000, NASA did something unusual: it asked amateurs to help it map the surface of Mars. The agency set up a Web site called Clickworkers, where people could take a short tutorial on how to classify Martian craters and then get to work clicking on photos of Mars. NASA then aggregated all those clicks to come up with… Read more ›

Happy Birthday Web

2014-5-18 // by The Webbys

Cenk Uygur, Dave Rubin and other commentators from The Young Turks revisit coverage of the Web and Internet to give special thanks to these revolutionary technologies.… Read more ›

The Global Rich List

2014-5-17 // by The Webbys

Global Rich List is an interactive project created by agency Poke London to draw attention to the distorted view of wealth in the Western world. Visitors enter their income with expectations that are often shattered when it’s revealed how well off they are in relation to the rest of the globe. … Read more ›

Everyone Is Empowered to Create and Share

2014-5-16 // by The Webbys

We live in an age of universal creation and co-creation – one where technology is both an afterthought and ever-present. We optimists can’t help but be excited by the possibilities for anyone to lend his or her voice to the global dialog, to make contact with others across the world, and to develop unique content, products, and experiences. Compared with… Read more ›

The FCC Wishes The World Wide Web A Happy 25th Birthday

2014-5-15 // by The Webbys

In honor of the World Wide Web’s 25th birthday, we here at the FCC are happy to celebrate our support of service providers such as Comcast and Time-Warner. Let’s not let “net neutrality” get in the way of user experience- we want to make it fast and easy for you to get to the good web sites, and… Read more ›

The Internet of Things

2014-5-14 // by The Webbys

On March 12, 1989 (25 years ago), Tim Berners-Lee wrote a paper proposing an “information management” system that became the conceptual and architectural structure for the Web. He eventually released the code for his system—for free—to the world on Christmas Day in 1990. It became a milestone in easing the way for ordinary people to access documents and interact over a network… Read more ›

The Web in Alphabetical Order

2014-5-13 // by The Webbys

The Web in Alphabetical Order According to ICANN, .COM domains were intended for business, .ORG for nonprofit, and .NET for internet providers and “Web Portals.” Internet Directory is a listing of every domain—beginning with the 115 million .COMs—as they stand in early 2014. On a fast browser (Chrome or Safari), it takes 599 days to watch every domain scroll by. Surprises… Read more ›

The Greatest Serendipity Engine in History

2014-5-12 // by The Webbys

The Web has been described as the greatest serendipity engine in history. With a few clicks, it can take us from a site about Britney Spears to a post about monarch butterflies via peanut butter cookie recipes, BBC Radio 4’s Friday Night Comedy and an essay about Karl Marx. Never before have we had such an abundance of diverse information… Read more ›

The Invention of The Emoticon

2014-5-11 // by The Webbys

With the invention of the Web came an influx of written correspondence. And, as anyone who has tried to convey sarcasm online can attest, tone can easily get lost between the lines of an email. That’s why in 1982 computer scientist Scott Fahlman invented the emoticon. His invention actually predates the Web: The above suggestion was posted on a message… Read more ›

Free Rice and Crowdsourcing Social Change

2014-5-10 // by The Webbys

The Web is an invention that has given us infinite possibilities to connect with one another and collectively work toward social change. With that in mind, the founders of Freerice.com launched their site on October 7, 2007, with the intention to feed the world’s hungry. Visitors play a trivia game that donates rice for ever correct answer. In its first… Read more ›

ground.alt

2014-5-9 // by The Webbys

ground.alt was created by visual artist, Ryoichi Kurokawa using digital reconstructions of images and audio recorded by journalist and filmmaker Daniel Demoustier over the last dozen years in the Middle East. Three images depict the different viewpoints of situations which are involved in conflict and war. The Web provides a medium through which people can get an inside look… Read more ›

What is the Web?

2014-5-8 // by The Webbys

“How is the World Wide Web different from the Internet? Does it matter? And why does thinking about the web as an ‘ocean’ make so much sense?” Michael Stevens is the creator of Vsauce… Read more ›

Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s address at Net Mundial

2014-5-7 // by Dillon Mann

On 23 April, Sir Tim Berners-Lee addressed the Net Mundial conference in Brazil. He spoke alongside Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff and a host of other dignitaries. Here is the text of his remarks: “Twenty-five years ago, when the Internet had been running for 20 years, there was internet mail and net news and remote login, but there was no web.  No… Read more ›

World Wide Weird

2014-5-7 // by The Webbys

I’m a collector of unpopular culture. Since I was a teenager, I’ve been attracted to the fringes of art, literature, music, science, and technology. I grew up hanging around alternative record stores, dialing into underground Bulletin Board Systems, trading photocopied ‘zines, scouring used book stores, watching third generation dupes of psychotronic films, and researching anomalous phenomena at the… Read more ›

Banner Art

2014-5-6 // by The Webbys

Banner ads have been an important part of the internet and its expansion, but nowadays people ignore and even wants to block them by using “ad blocking” programs. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Web, we wanted to give these poor things a chance to become a star, by transforming them into something fun & beautiful. We used the… Read more ›

The First Web, and Beyond

2014-5-5 // by The Webbys

Web Crawlers A Web crawler is a bot that, starting with a list of one or more Websites (seed), downloads them and adds all their links to the same list, and continues downloading and adding links, probably without encountering any limit (Websites are created faster than a bot’s speed). Crawlers are exploration algorithms that start in tiny regions of… Read more ›

The First Kickstarter Project

2014-5-3 // by The Webbys

Before crowdfunding was officially “a thing,” this project was fully backed for $35 on May 3, 2009 — the first successful Kickstarter ever. In a few short years, the platform has led the charge in changing the way we invest in and support projects. In 2013 alone, $380 million was pledged to back Kickstarters, just one of many reasons why they’re the 2014 Webby Breakout of… Read more ›

#TWWAF - That Which We All Fear

2014-5-2 // by The Webbys

A sensory deprivation cinema experiment. This site explores the way in which we as people physically interact with different types of film. Specifically those reactions that include scenes of horror. By using a visitors webcam and face-detection technology to deliver content based on whether or not the visitor’s face is in view or obscured. When the visitor’s face… Read more ›

The Innovators

2014-5-1 // by The Webbys

An exclusive unpublished excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s book The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. Available October 7, 2014. As the Web was taking off in 1993, I was the editor of new media for Time Inc., in charge of the magazine company’s Internet strategy. In previous years, we had made deals with… Read more ›

25 Years of Memes

2014-5-1 // by The Webbys

The Internet is ushering in a new golden age of animation and the sharability of GIFs and memes is helping it along. Unfathomable in an age without the Internet, the GIF is a new form of communication that emotes in ways that words cannot, while memes help us connect based on shared interests, with near infinite iterations and possibilities. Anyone… Read more ›

Unlooping Film

2014-5-1 // by The Webbys

Unlooping Film approaches the ambivalences of the World Wide Web as a space toward which all multitudes and masses flow, revealing the most extreme discourses in the contemporary political scope. We depart from hashtags which are used by groups with radically different ideological aspirations, such as homophobia, terrorism, World Cup, among others. Hashtags are used as a way of searching… Read more ›

This Is for Everyone

2014-5-1 // by The Webbys

For a recent curatorial experiment on the website of The Museum of Modern Art, my colleagues Jamer Hunt, Michelle Fisher, and Kate Carmody and I have been tracking the ways in which design intersects with violence. Each week, we’ve asked one writer—and so far, they’ve been a mixture of authors, artists, designers, sociologists, academics, and laypeople—to… Read more ›

Announcing The Webbys 25 for 25

2014-5-1 // by David-Michel Davies

I remember the first time I saw the World Wide Web like it was ten minutes ago. Two pages into footbag.org, I knew instantly that the world was different, and not because I was so prescient or insightful as a 19-year-old in college in 1993, but because the Web was so radical it felt instantly futuristic – like we had gone… Read more ›

Web @ 25, W3C @ 20 – Creating an Agile Web Standards Ecosystem

2014-4-7 // by Jeff Jaffe

Last week I wrote about the future direction of the Open Web Platform. The success of the Web emanates from numerous sources.  Its success comes from the basic idea of the Web, generations of innovators who have found better ways to utilize the Web, investments by companies to improve the value of the Web, etc. The Web Standards community… Read more ›

Web 25 - Small Grants Available to Help Celebrate the Web’s Birthday

2014-3-31 // by Dillon Mann

The Web We Want Campaign, co-organised by the Web Foundation is inviting individuals and organisations around the world to help celebrate the Web’s birthday throughout the 25th anniversary year. The movement is inviting you put forward your own proposal for a “birthday party” event or action that will get popular audiences involved in debating, celebrating and imagining the Web… Read more ›

Yahoo and Web Foundation Event Celebrates Web 25th Anniversary in Vancouver

2014-3-20 // by Dillon Mann

On Wednesday 19 March, Yahoo and the Web Foundation hosted a party in Vancouver to celebrate the Web’s 25th birthday. Themed ‘25 on 25’, the event featured some of the Web’s most famous users sharing their memories of the past 25 years and discussing wishes for its future. Attendees and participants included Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, musician and activist will.i… Read more ›

Press Release: The World Celebrates 25 Years of the Web

2014-3-12 // by Ian Jacobs

The World Celebrates 25 Years of the Web Web users across the globe share #web25 birthday messages to mark the day Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web 12 March, 2014. Today, around the world, people are joining Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee in wishing the World Wide Web a happy 25th birthday. To mark the occasion, everyone is encouraged to share birthday greetings… Read more ›

25 things you probably didn’t know about the Web

2014-3-12 // by Ian Jacobs

The Web of today was built - and continues to be built - by everyone. Yet it owes much to many people, some who came before its invention in 1989, and all those who have since then made it an invaluable resource for humanity. To celebrate 25 years of the Web we have gathered 24 facts about Tim Berners-Lee, the Web, the World… Read more ›

#web25: A blog from the Web Foundation CEO

2014-3-12 // by Anne Jellema

Today, 12 March 2014, is the Web’s 25th birthday. Why is today significant for all of us? Because, really, the Web is humanity connected. Put simply, the Web amplifies the power of people. Millions of people have helped to build the Web, and the power to harness it for good is now within the grasp of everyone who is connected. In… Read more ›

El mundo celebra los 25 años de la Web

2014-3-10 // by Ian Jacobs

Note: This is the Spanish version of Press Release: The World Celebrates 25 Years of the Web. El mundo celebra los 25 años de la Web Usuarios de la Web envían mensajes de cumpleaños (#web25) conmemorando el día en que Tim Berners-Lee inventó la World Wide Web 12 de marzo de 2014. Hoy, a lo largo de todo el planeta,… Read more ›

Le monde entier fête les 25 ans du Web

2014-3-10 // by Ian Jacobs

Note: This is the French version of Press Release: The World Celebrates 25 Years of the Web. Le monde entier fête les 25 ans du Web Tous les internautes de la planète partagent leurs messages d’anniversaire #web25 pour célébrer le jour où Tim Berners-Lee a inventé le World Wide Web. http://www.w3.org - Le 12 mars 2014.… Read more ›

世界で祝すWeb25周年

2014-3-10 // by Ian Jacobs

Note: This is the Japanese version of Press Release: The World Celebrates 25 Years of the Web. 世界で祝すWeb25周年Tim Berners-LeeがWorld Wide Webを発明してから25年       2014年3月12日は、Tim Berners-LeeがWorld Wide Webを発明してから25年となる記念すべき日です。本日までに世界中のWebユーザからメッセージをいただいています。慶應義塾大学SFC研究所に、W3C/慶應義塾大学(W3C慶應)を1996年9月に設置して以来、東アジア地区を担当するW3C運営ホストを担っています。… Read more ›

العالم يحتفل بمرور 25 عاما من الشبكة العنكبوتية

2014-3-10 // by Ian Jacobs

Note: This is the Arabic version of Press Release: The World Celebrates 25 Years of the Web. العالم يحتفل بمرور 25 عاما من الشبكة العنكبوتية مستخدمي الانترنت عبر العالم يشتركون رسائل عيد ميلاد #web25 للاحتفا بيوم “تيم بيرنرز لي” اخترع الشبكة العنكبوتية العالمية 12 مارس 2014: اليوم في جميع أنحاء العالم يتلاقون الناس مع “تيم بيرنرز لي” … Read more ›

Die Welt feiert den 25. Geburtstag des World Wide Web

2014-3-10 // by Ian Jacobs

Note: This is the German version of Press Release: The World Celebrates 25 Years of the Web. Die Welt feiert den 25. Geburtstag des World Wide Web Auf der ganzen Welt verschicken Internetznutzer unter dem Hashtag #web25 Geburtstagsgrüße, um den Tag zu feiern, an dem Tim Berners-Lee das Word Wide Web erfunden hat. 12. März 2014. Heute feiert das World Wide Web… Read more ›

O mundo comemora os 25 anos da Web

2014-3-10 // by Ian Jacobs

Note: This is the Portuguese version of Press Release: The World Celebrates 25 Years of the Web. O mundo comemora os 25 anos da Web Os usuários da Web em todo o mundo compartilham mensagens de aniversário com a hashtag #web25 para marcar o dia em que Tim Berners- Lee inventou a World Wide Web 12 de março de 2014. Hoje,… Read more ›

全球共庆万维网诞生25周年

2014-3-10 // by Ian Jacobs

Note: This is the Chinese version of Press Release: The World Celebrates 25 Years of the Web. 全球共庆万维网诞生25周年 全球万维网用户共享#Web25#话题,纪念Tim Berners-Lee爵士发明万维网25周年 2014年3月12日,今天,全球亿万用户与Tim Berners-Lee爵士一起庆祝万维网诞生25周年。… Read more ›

مرحباً بكم في الذكرى الخامسة والعشرين لانطلاقة الويب - رسالة من تيم بيرنرز لي

2014-3-10 // by Tim Berners-Lee

قبل خمسةٍ وعشرين عاماً، تقدمت باقتراح مشروعٍ لرئيسي في العمل فيما بات يُعرف اليوم باسم “الشبكة العنكبوتية العالمية - الويب”. كانت الفكرة “غامضة ولكن مثيرة” بالنسبة لمديري؛ مثيرةً لدرجة أنه سمح لي بالعمل على تطويرها كعملٍ ثانوي. … Read more ›

Il Mondo celebra i 25 anni del Web

2014-3-10 // by Ian Jacobs

Note: This is the Italian version of Press Release: The World Celebrates 25 Years of the Web. Il Mondo celebra i 25 anni del Web Gli utenti Web nel mondo condividono i messaggi di auguri per il (#web25) anniversario del giorno in cui Tim Berners-Lee ha inventato il World Wide Web 12 Marzo, 2014. Oggi, da tutto il mondo tutti si uniscono all’inventore… Read more ›

De Wereld Viert 25 Jaar Web

2014-3-10 // by Ian Jacobs

Note: This is the Dutch version of Press Release: The World Celebrates 25 Years of the Web. De Wereld Viert 25 Jaar Web Webgebruikers van over de hele wereld delen #web25 verjaardagsberichten op de dag dat Tim Berners-Lee het World Wide Web uitvond. 12 maart 2014. Vandaag sluiten mensen van over de hele wereld zich aan bij Webuitvinder Tim Berners-Lee om het World Wide… Read more ›

25 éves a Web

2014-3-10 // by Ian Jacobs

Note: This is the Hungarian version of Press Release: The World Celebrates 25 Years of the Web. A világ a Web 25 éves születésbnapját ünnepli Internetezők küldenek és osztanak meg egymással a #web 25 születésnapi üzeneteket azt a napot ünnepelve, amikor Tim Berners-Lee feltalálta a World Wide Web-et. Ma, 2014. március 12-én.… Read more ›

웹 탄생 25주년을 기념하며…

2014-3-9 // by Ian Jacobs

Note: This is the Korean version of Press Release: The World Celebrates 25 Years of the Web. 웹 탄생 25주년을 기념하며… 전 세계 웹 사용자들, #web25를 통해 팀 버너스-리의 월드와이드웹(WWW)의 탄생 25주년 기념 2014년 3월 12일, 전 세계인들이 웹의 창시자인 팀 버너스-리(Tim Berners-Lee)와 함께 월드와이드웹(WWW)의… Read more ›

Hela världen firar webbens 25-årsjubileum

2014-3-9 // by Ian Jacobs

Note: This is the Swedish version of Press Release: The World Celebrates 25 Years of the Web. Hela världen firar webbens 25-årsjubileum Webbanvändare världen över delar gratulationsmeddelanden taggade med #web25, för att fira den dag då Tim Berners-Lee uppfann webben 12 mars 2014. Världen över gör idag människor gemensam sak med webbens uppfinnare Tim Berners-Lee,… Read more ›