How much the Web has changed things in 15 years.
All this we now take for granted. To get a handle on the scale of what has happened, think back to what the world was like 15 years ago. Amazon was a large river in South America. Ryanair was an Irish airline that flew to places nobody had ever heard of. eBay was a typo. Yahoo was a term from Gulliver’s Travels. A googol was a very large number (one followed by a hundred zeroes). Classified ads were densely printed matter in newspapers. ‘Encyclopedia’ was a synonym for Encyclopedia Britannica. And if you wanted
to read what your MP had said in the Commons yesterday you had to queue at the Stationery Office in London to buy Hansard. Oh, and there were quaint little shops in high streets called ‘travel agents’.
The Observer‘s list of the 15 web sites that “changed the world”:
- eBay.com
- wikipedia.com
- napster.com
- youtube.com
- blogger.com
- friendsreunited.com
- drudgereport.com
- myspace.com
- amazon.com
- slashdot.org
- salon.com
- craigslist.org
- google.com
- yahoo.com
- wholewheatradio.org
- easyjet.com
Some of these — MySpace and YouTube — are such recent (though massive) players on the big stage that it may be premature to list them. Some of these I’ve never used.
Still, thinking of how just Blogger, Amazon, and Google — not to mention Yahoo, eBay, and Wikipedia — have changed things in my life, it’s … pretty remarkable. And how different Katherine’s world will be because of the Internet, too …
(via J-Walk)