Download: A History of the Internet on Discovery Channel

A cool new series is being telecasted on Discovery channel. This is the great way in understanding the Internet revolution that happened in the last decade and which has changed our lives for ever. The Series will let us know some of the key events that took place, the key companies/products that changed the digital world and the people behind them. I am really excited for this.
More information on the same is available at
http://www.hastac.org/node/1251
I also found a google video http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=380058528391483877

Some of the key points from the Video:

1. Internet is about connecting people
2. Youtube: Broadcast yourself. There is not central control of the video--No master of the media
3. DIGG: People digg (vote) the story so that its get featured on the main page. People are deciding what they consider exciting and what not
4. facebook: Its all about relationship among human beings. facebook is trying to map the way man thinks he is connected to the other people..concept of social graph.
5. facebook allows you to develop applications and host them on facebook so that others can see and use them.
6. General pattern of the popular web 2.0 businesses is :
   
1. started in college dorms as a fun project
2. launched among college students
3. through word of mouth gets vastly popular
4. geek opts to drop out of the college
5. starts a company based on the project
6. A giant business buys it at an incredible rate
   
7. college geek becomes extremely rich ......time involved for hitting this jackpot ~2years
7. Some of the key acquisitions were Youtube by google (1.65bn$), MySpace by Rupert Murdoch(600million $), facebook by Microsoft,flickr by Yahoo, delicious by yahoo
   
8. Digital media specially music has played a big role in bringing the people together
9. It was because of the mp3 that the music could be compressed and easily shared on the net
10. Napster laid the foundation of the new experience on the internet i.e. exchange digital media. Today Youtube allows you to share the video, flickr allows to share the photos but back in 98-99, Napster made the sharing of music a child's play and took the internet by storm
11. Napster was the fastest spreading software at that time.
    
12. The USP of Napster was if there is a computer on the internet which has got collection of songs and you want to download those songs...establish a peer to peer network with that computer and get the songs. Napster software helped in doing that. No computer is the central repository. Your home system can be a repository for somebody sitting in some part of the world
13. Because of Napster people from different geographic locations , who had never heard about the other, no mails, no chat were suddenly exchanging massive data...This also laid the foundation of social networking
14. An estimate says that 85% of the total bandwidth available in the college networks was being used to exchange music
15. The internet usage suddenly raised and so the number of users... The user centric application theme got the first voice through Napster
    
16. The popularity of Napster had raised the questions of copyright violation of the digital media which overnight became available for free. The record stores lost major market since the college guys (their major customer) were downloading the music for free.
17. Unfortunately Napster company was shutdown after the court order..but it had showed the would be Youtube, flickr, digg how to get the people attention. Majority of internet users are not worried about the information about latest books, articles, conference,how stuff works. instead they want to play with media. They want to watch movies, videos, photos, listen to free music, communicate with friends. Its all about what are the most common interests of people and can you provide them over the internet..Bang you have a new rocking web business
18. MySpace is another business that boosted the Social Networking idea in the sillicon valley and suddenly we had facebook, orkut coming up on those lines
19. Youtube, MySpace, facebook have earned their founders a lot but there are some businesses which are as popular as these businesses but they are not earning any money: Craiglist, wikipedia
20. The philosophy of craiglist is that they want to provide the newspaper classified sections for free. The advertisements are more organized , easy to search and available for almost all geographic loactions in the world. I can search for all advertisements for a house in NY,USA sitting in Bangalore,India.
    
21. Youtube provide people to share videos , Flickr provided photo sharing, Digg provided people the ability to decide what they consider is the top news, facebook provided people opportunity to make friends and remain connected to them....now people would also like to become authors,publishers and what not, so we have BLOGS
22. Blogging is one of the most popular activity on the internet. People blog on various things. People feel excited that they can also write contents, and publish them just like any author in OLD days used to do. If you are reading this article then you know what I mean :)
23. There is a whole lot of potential to become a new business on the internet...just need to find if it is user centric,how can a user participate in changing the content of your site. Today the User wants to become a peer in adding the content on your site rather than just a meek recipient of the content.