Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Happy birthday yesterday World Wide Web! Yes the collection of pictures, text, cat gifs
and *** we know and love and use every day is a mere 25 years old. which, YouTube analytics
tells me, is only about as old as most of us watching this right now. Yeah I'm watching
it back too, narcissist that I am.
Anyway, to celebreate the 25th anniversary of the web, here's not just five, but 25 facts
about the web, in just 2 minutes and 50 seconds. See what we did there? Right, start the clock.
Internet and web are often confused: Internet is the bit that refers to the networking infrastructure,
and the web is the sites, images and other files stored on that network.
Tim Berner's Lee's boss wasn't convinced about his web idea, calling it 'Vague but Interesting'.
It caught on though, 50 million people were online in four years. It took radio 38.
The first ever website only went online on August 6 1991, this is the oldest surviving
version of it.
And it doesn't have WWW in the name because it doesn't need it. Typing WWW started out
as a custom for identifying whether you wanted to visit a website or, for example, an ftp
server. We haven't needed to do it on most sites for years.
And on www, the World Wide Web was nearly called the Information Mesh, Mine of Information
or Information Mine.
And what's on the Information mine? It's estimated that 80% of pictures online are of naked women.
And a third of all searches are for ***.
It started early too, this saucy shot was the first picture ever uploaded, an image
of the CERN house band Les Horribles Cernettes uploaded in 1992.
And this was the first banner ad, for Wired Magazine's online equivalent in 1994. It was
just as annoying and ugly as banner ads today, but 44% of people clicked it.
It caught on too, $15 billion was spent on banner ads last year alone.
Now a few net stats - Some webby, some more internety, because it can be hard to differentiate.
Anyway: Over 300 billion emails are sent every day
90% of all of these are spam
The internet takes up roughly five million terabytes.
Of which google have indexed just 0.004%
Including over 2 billion web pages
100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
And over six billion hours are watched every month, nearly an hour per person.
Speaking of which, there are more devices connected to the internet than there are actual
humans.
Although less than half of the worlds' population has internet access.
And what are we doing? Tweeting, shopping on Amazon and bidding on Ebay probably, but
it nearly didn't come to be. amazon was almost called Cadabra, eBay was nearly echobay, and
Twitter? Well it was nearly Jitter. Do you jeet? How about I rejeet that for you? No.
Speaking of big companies, wikipedia is the only top 100 website not owned by a big corporation
Viruses are a constant problem, but there are more old skool hacks. In 2008, five internet
cables connecting the Middle East to the net were cut. But not the ones connecting Israel,
or US occupied Iraq. Hmmm.
Not that the Arabic speaking world missed much, over half of web pages are in English,
though that number is dropping.
As is the age at which we get online. In the West, we typically take our first digital
steps at 6 months old.
So there you have it. 25 facts to mark 25 years of the net. And it's going to become
more and more a part of our lives. We're now entering the so-called web 3.0, in which every
aspect of our lives from health to education is decentralised and networked online. Which
is pretty scary, but could be pretty cool.