Web to Web 2.0 Timeline: Just in Time for Blogger's Big 010 !

Happy Birthday Blogger! Would you believe it, already Blogger  celebrating it's 10th? This is great news and amazing how since Web 2.0, bloggers have been springing up everywhere. Only thing is, we still do not have the exact birthday date. Maybe we could make that day "BLOG DAY an official holiday? Was it in August or in September? I’m certain many of us would love to know when the candles were blown out so that could have all joined in to sing "O Happy B Day Blogger...!" Blogger Buzz please keep us all posted on news about your BIG 010!

In 2007, Jonathan Adler of the Wall Street Journal reported an estimated 22.6 million bloggers in the US with less than a quarter of 1%, only .02% (452,000) using blogging as their primary source of income, illustrating that writers with their primary source of income from blogs are not a significant indication of the overall blogging population in the US. Interestingly the US internet users were estimated at 108.1 million in 2000 and as of June 2009 is reported at 251.7 million, an increase of 133% from 9 years ago with a country ranking of 3 at 15.1% of the 1.6 billion world internet user population with Asia ranking 1st at 42% of total 1.6 billion world internet users and Europe 2nd at 24.2%. Latin America/Caribbean ranks 4th at 10.5%. For a detailed chart of internet world stats go to Internet World Stats.

Below please find a brief Web to Web 2.0 timeline of newsworthy milestones which purport to provide a basic historical and informational chronology from a marketing perspective:


• 1994 – In January, Jerry Yang and David Filo create "Jerry's Guide to the WWW" while studying at Stanford University and renames it Yahoo in April

• 1995 – Yahoo is incorporated in March

• 1995 – Amazon is launched

• 1995 – Search engines are launched

• 1999 – Although bookmarking was around earlier, bookmarking became popular in businesses and mainstream during this period

• 2000 – Sites are optimized for search engines that were being catalogued on the Web

• 1996 to 1999 – Search engines are launched with pay per click programs, Open Text in 1996 and GoTo.com in 1998

• 1997 – The first blog goes online, known as “weblog” originally used as a niche for geeks; Weblog was coined in December 1997 by Jorn Barger 

• 1997 – The phrase “search engine optimization” is mostly likely coined during this period, according to Danny Sullivan of  The New York Times

• 1998 – Google  is founded by Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin and files for incorporation in California on September 7th

• 1999 – The first version of RSS feed is created in March by Romanathan V. Guha for use on the My.Netscape.com portal (RSS 0.9)

• 1999 – Blogger  is launched. Evan Williams and Megan Hourihan of Pyra Labs, originally created this software with the intention of being an in-house application to integrate project management, contact management and task lists. Blogger becomes available to the public in August but does not become mainstream until later

• 2000 – Google reaches the first billion-URL index and earns the reputation of being the largest search engine in the world; Adwords program is launched offering internet pay per click programs; Yahoo selects Google as it's default search results provider

• 2001 – GoTo.com changes their name to Overture (purchased by Yahoo later)

• 2001 – According to MediaPost on August 9, 2001, Jupiter research predicted spending on digital marketing US ad spending would reach $19 billion by 2006

• 2001 – Wikipedia is available but is not yet mainstream
• 2001 – Danny Sullivan of The New York Times coins the term “Search Engine Marketing”

• 2002 – Search Engine Marketing US advertising spending reaches approximately $1.3 billion

• 2002 – Blogger  is completely rewritten at Prya Labs for licensure for other countries, with Globo company of Brazil becoming the first licensee recipient

• 2002 – Blogs gain momentum

• 2002 – Consumer Reports WebWatch files a report about the controversy and issues on search engine paid advertising

• 2002 - Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issues communications about the importance of paid advertising on search engines in response to a complaint from Consumer Advocacy Group, affiliated with Ralph Nader

• 2003 – Google purchases Blogger in February

• 2003 – Yahoo purchases the Overture pay per click (PPC) program and offers paid online advertising

• 2003 – Del.icio.us,  initially known as a passive bookmark function launches; Later on del.icio.us becomes very popular with the launch of Friendster (2007); Users are able to let other users see what they are bookmarking; Social bookmarking gained popularity with the launch of del.icio.us.

• 2003 – The second US 3G (3rd generation cellular wireless) Verizon Wireless network operation launches; The first US Monet Mobile Wireless launched and shut down shortly afterwards; Japan, May 2001 and Korea, May 2002, were the first 2 countries to launch 3G operation networks

• 2003 - The Can Spam Act is signed into law on December 16th by President George W. Bush to regulate commercial email and is enforced by the FTC

• 2004 - Yahoo launches its own web-crawling algorithm in February, using its own site index phasing out Google's search results system it has used since May 2000


• 2004 -Google launches Gmail; In April Amazon partnered with Google using it' search results system

• 2004 - The first Annual Advertising Week Conference begins in September in New York City

• 2004 -  Web 2.0 O’Reilly Conference is held on October 5 – 7, 2004 at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco, CA. Although about16 years into Web 0.0 and 5 years into Web 2.0, we still do not know where it is going; Transformational elements are unknown as Web-Web2.0 are still new and the industry has no idea of what infrastructures will go away. Many innovations with no ads, no subscription feeds, free to the end user, are floating on venture capital. Big issue is these innovations lack business models and it is predicted that many of these web innovations probably will not survive unless purchased, merged, with a larger company, etc.

• Wikipedia and Blogs become mainstream; Momentum is largely attributable to the announcement of Web 2.0
• February 2004 Flickr (image tag base navigation becomes available)
• February 2004 - it is estimated that Facebook has over 10 billion photos from over 125 million users by the end of 2004 (Facebook & Flickr become the biggest privacy disasters)

• 2005 – National Governments all over the world embrace Web 2.0 and create official blogs; Israel is the first country to have a government blog, IsraelPolitik

• 2005 - February 2005 – YouTube

• 2005 – August 2005 - Library Thing

• 2005 – Search Engine Marketing advertising spending is at approximately $5.8 billion (a 363% increase from 2002)

• 2005 – Google begins personalizing search results by users dependent upon user’s previous search history

• 2005 – In December, Microsoft and the Outlook team announce they are using the RSS feed icon which was first used in the Mozilla Firefox Browser 

• 2006 - $18.7 billion on internet ads was invested worldwide in 2006

• 2006 – Twitter is launched in October and evolves into a virtual water cooler experience having the power to hold social groups; Users can chat away about what they're doing and if anyone is interested in knowing, they can read, or watch what you’re doing and reply, follow, etc.; E.g., discuss iPhone feature,  communicate with people in different parts of the world separated in space and time; Although it is not the same as face to face it is similar enough to feel some kind of connection to people using twitter, Facebook or Youtube

• 2006 – Search Engine Marketing takes the lead in advertising and grows much faster than traditional advertising and other online marketing channels; US SEM advertising spending reaches approximately $9.4 billion, (a 62% increase over 2005 US spending); Worldwide, US 2006 ad spending had a 38% marketshare of total global internet ad spending calculated at $24.9 billion internet ads invested worldwide in 2006 (an increase of 33% from the previous year’s worldwide ad spending); Interesting to note that Jupiter’s estimate back in August 2001 was off by almost $10.0 billion less than actual of $9.4 billion

• 2006 – Google acquires YouTube, an internet video sharing service

• 2007 – October 2007 FriendFeed is created by former Google employees (known as the first lifestreaming service integrating all of your internet activity in your friendfeed nework, can have messages from twitter pulled into friendfeed which generates a lot of discussion in friendfeed and social networking feedback which can lead you to discover other sources of friends with similar interests; If you are traveling and you are in the same location as someone else in your friendfeed network, this can be a useful tool in knowing who in your network is nearby; all different internet activities are funneled into a single place and has a personal view; has the highest level of discussion, can get a huge amount of interaction in friendfeed more than from blogs; can create a room and pull entries from different sources that can create an RSS feed, audio podcasts, etc. used by science publishers, libarians, etc. create customized feeds that can come to you, the individual, on what type of information you want to have delivered to you)

• 2007 – pay-per-click programs become primary money-makers for search engines

• 2007 – Google announces a campaign against “paid links” that transfer page rank and many urls are suspended and banned from the Web

• 2007 – China's launch of 3G network is delayed in September 2007; A total of 190 3G networks are operating in 40 countries by December 2007

• 2008 – Google Chrome is released on September 4th and celebrates it's 10th year on September 7th

• 2008 – Sprint NOW 3G Network (3rd generation of cellular wireless) is launched in December

• 2008 – Web 2008 World of Social Networking:  private information becomes public

• Blogs, wikis, RSS, bookmarking, image tagging, multimedia, search, etc. 

• 2008 – US internet ad spending reaches $27.5 billion

• 2008 – The Dow's biggest one-day drop on September 29, 2008 of 778 points (surpassing the first trading day loss after 9/11), after the rejection of the House bailout plan; According to CNN Money, this drop represents an approximate value loss of $1.2 trillion

• 2009 – Google takes measures to mitigate the effects of PageRank sculpting by use of nofollow attribute on links

• 2009 – The future of blogging is customization and life relevancy; After 16 years after inception, LifeStream  is all the buzz as the next generation of social media. Back in the mid 1990’s, the term LifeStream was originally coined by Eric Freeman and David Gelertner at Yale University to describe a cyber diary of one’s life, streaming all of internet activities in one cohesive lifestream. Now about 15 years later, LifeStreaming, an innovative cyber platform combines all of a individual’s internet activities and information onto a unified platform known as a stream. Addins and plugins are created to help the user to “stream his/her life” and are listed as follows:

• SimpleLife Wordpress plugin to add to your lifestream as a widget or webpage
• RSS Stream Wordpress plugin
• Sweetcron

• 2009 - Advertising Week celebrates it's fifth annual event September 21st - 25th at the Nokia Theatre in New York City

• 2009 - Blogger is celebrating it’s 10th anniversary by adding lots of features requested by it's users; Wonder what day was the actual birthday and who blew out the candles? Any belated birthday blog celebrations besides mine which comes with cake and all? Perhaps Blogger's celebration will be at the next Web 2.0 Summitt? 

• October 2009 - Web 2.0 Summit, Co-produced by TechWeb and O’Reilly Media Inc. is being held on October 20 - 22, 2009 in San Francisco, CA at the Westin San Francisco Market Street

• If you are interested in following please feel free to follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/gbdaly  

If you have any comments about Blogger's Big 010, don't hesitate to post your comments. Thanks for visiting and again, "Happy Blog Day to you Blogger!"

written by Gloria Buono Daly (c) 2009