What the Internet Was Like in 2001
Even in the middle of the dot-com bust in 2001, there are rays of hope: Wikipedia and the Wayback Machine launch, digital music turns legit with iTunes and the iPod, and blogging goes mainstream.
The year 2001 began with optimism — in January, Wikipedia debuted and Apple launched iTunes. But by year’s end the mood had shifted. The dot-com crash had drained Silicon Valley’s exuberance, Napster was being dismantled in court, and the new wave of post-9/11 “warblogs” made the internet feel solemn and overly serious. Meanwhile, Microsoft continued its dominance over the web with the release of Internet Explorer 6.
Despite the doom and gloom, 2001 was also a year in which the web continued to mature. It gained a memory through Wikipedia and the Wayback Machine, discovered new voices through blogs and communities like MetaFilter, and began to legitmately shake up the cultural industries with iTunes and the iPod.
Wikipedia and Wayback
Wikipedia launched on January 15 as a side project of Nupedia, an encyclopedia which required scholars to submit articles for expert review. Wikipedia, by contrast, was wide open: anyone could edit. Inspired by Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb software, Wikipedia published a thousand articles in its first month; by the end of the year, more than 20,000. By comparison, Nupedia had published fewer than 24 articles in the year before Wikipedia launched.
Larry Sanger, one of the co-founders of Wikipedia alongside Jimmy Wales, later wrote that the initial idea "was that the wiki would be set up as part of Nupedia; it was to be a way for the public to develop a stream of content that could be fed into the Nupedia process." But Wikipedia soon became the main project and "Nupedia withered due to neglect." Key to Wikipedia's momentum — and subsequent success — was its lack of hierarchical structure; but as Sanger pointed out, this had good and bad implications:
"...this provisional "hands off" management policy had the effect of creating a difficult-to-change tradition, the tradition of making the project extremely tolerant of disruptive (uncooperative, "trolling") behavior. And as it turned out, particularly with the large waves of new contributors from the summer and fall of 2001, the project became very resistant to any changes in this policy."
Somehow, despite the chaos and occassional bad behaviour of participants, Wikipedia quickly established itself as the web's encyclopedia.
Nine months after Wikipedia's launch, another tool for memory arrived: the Wayback Machine, launched publicly by the Internet Archive in October 2001. It was a kind of time travel for websites: you entered a URL and an earlier version would display. The Wayback Machine wasn’t perfect: broken images, missing scripts, frames gone askew. Nevertheless, it gave the web a sense of permanence, even as so many dot-coms were disappearing.
IE6 and Microsoft's Web Power
When Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) was released in August 2001, it was bundled with Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows XP. By this point, IE was by far the most dominant browser — Netscape was now in the single figures in market share and the debut of Mozilla's open source Firefox browser was still a few years away.
At first glance, IE6 didn't seem that impressive. Paul Thurrott's contemporary review put it plainly:
"When compared to previous IE versions, IE 6 doesn't offer many new features, aside from an XP-like user interface, some digital media-related improvements, and support for Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) technologies that, as far as I can tell, isn't even used by very many Web sites anyway."
But compared to its competitors — which included the open source Mozilla 0.9.4 — IE6 was more stable (less crashes) and faster. More than anything, IE was the browser that most websites were developed for. As Thurrott put it:
"IE 6 comes up a winner primarily because of its sheer ubiquitousness. When you browse the Web, you transparently understand that virtually every site on the Web is going to display properly with this browser, because Web developers simply can't ignore the market leader. For the bullet point crowd, Microsoft says that it supports a variety of Web standards, including Dynamic HTML (DHTML), CSS Level 1, HTML Document Object Model (DOM) Level 1, XML, and so on. Frankly, this list doesn't compare very favorably to that of Mozilla, say, but then IE 6 is still more compatible with actual Web sites, so I'm not sure that such a comparison matters much in the real world."
In hindsight, we can say that IE6 froze the web in time — designers began coding specifically for it, which suppressed innovation. The Mozilla browser was a promising development, but it was too bloated and buggy in late-2001. It would eventually be transformed into Firefox, but that process would take a few more years to play out.
iTunes and iPod
If 2000 had been the year of Napster, then 2001 was the year of Apple's "digital lifestyle."
In January, Apple released iTunes 1.0 for Mac OS; a clean, drag-and-drop music library that gave MP3s a sheen of legitimacy. It wasn’t a store yet, just an organiser and CD ripper.
While Apple was positioning itself as the savior of online music, Napster’s fate was sealed in court. In February, a federal appeals panel upheld an injunction requiring it to block copyrighted songs; by July, Napster temporarily shut down. Some users migrated to Gnutella or the newly released BitTorrent protocol, but legal options were becoming more viable. Especially when Apple introduced the iPod in October.
The iPod's slogan — “1,000 songs in your pocket” — signaled that online music had finally been untethered from the PC. At first the iPod was Mac-only and expensive, but the combination of iTunes and iPod hinted at a new era: personal, portable, and, soon, monetised. The wild-west days of mass file sharing of music were effectively over.
Blogging Expands
At the beginning of 2001, most popular weblogs were a combination of personal journal and linkblog — a format encouraged by early blogging tools like Blogger, LiveJournal and Diaryland. But by the end of the year, blogging had become a real-time reporting tool too; most notably in the form of the “warblogs” that became popular after 9/11, like Talking Points Memo, Instapundit and Daily Dish.
The October launch of Movable Type was also a key moment in the professionalisation of blogging. Created by Ben and Mena Trott, it was a revelation for bloggers who wanted more control over their sites. MT supported multiple blogs from one installation, allowed full template customization, and generated static HTML pages — improving both speed and reliability. Crucially, it also supported RSS feeds out of the box (even by the end of 2001, RSS wasn't a default feature in Blogger).
By late 2001, RSS was spreading across the web, in particular via tech-focused blogs like Boing Boing and DiveIntoMark.
Alongside RSS came new experiments in blog infrastructure. In July 2001, MIT researcher Cameron Marlow launched Blogdex, a tool that tracked the most-linked URLs across thousands of weblogs.
The Bust & Looking Ahead
As 2001 drew to a close, the world still reeling from 9/11, the tech industry was stuck in the doldrums. Marc Andreessen’s current company, Loudcloud, had managed to raise some money in a March IPO. But as cofounder Ben Horowitz later said, “It may have been the least celebratory IPO in history.” Then in late September, its largest competitor, Exodus, filed for bankruptcy. The situation looked almost as dire for Loudcloud, as its quarterly losses continued to widen.
In early December, Andreessen spoke at the Oracle Open World Conference. Always a web booster, even in his current incarnation as an enterprise IT executive, he talked about “a wave of applications over the next five to ten years” that will make the Internet “very central to how businesses operate."
The problem was, this time nobody wanted to listen. The publication IT World Canada gave a brutal assessment: “Everyone knows the Web boom has gone bust. Everyone except Marc Andreessen, creator of Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser.”
So at the end of 2001, in the midst of the dot-com crash and now with the pall of 9/11 hanging over the world too, most people had lost faith in the internet. Of course, Andreessen would have the last laugh in the years to come. Also, the bloggers of this era — fresh from redesigning their sites using Movable Type — had a feeling that the web was only just getting started.
More year-by-year overviews of internet history:
- Dot-com: 1994 · 1995 · 1996 · 1997 · 1998 · 1999 · 2000 · 2001 · 2002 · 2003
- Web 2.0: 2004 · 2005 · 2006 · 2007 · 2008 · 2009 · 2010 · 2011 · 2012
Buy the Book
My Web 2.0 memoir, Bubble Blog: From Outsider to Insider in Silicon Valley's Web 2.0 Revolution, is now available to purchase:
- Paperback, US$19.99: Amazon; Bookshop.org
- eBook, US$9.99: Amazon Kindle Store; Apple Books; Google Play
Or search for "Bubble Blog MacManus" on your local online bookstore.