In the beginning, there was the Internet. As you’ll see from this timeline, its origins came from Cold War-era U.S. military researchers who wanted to figure out how to exchange data between computers in different parts of the country. In 1969, ARPANET, the forerunner to the modern Internet, first managed to connect computers in four different U.S. universities.
By 1985, the Internet was starting to get used broadly enough that news organizations were doing stories about its impact. Here’s one from the Canadian Broadcasting Network that somebody posted on YouTube. In the video, you’ll see shots of what the Internet looked like before the World Wide Web. Here is what a pre-web Internet news site looked like:
(From David Carlson)
Then came Tim Berners-Lee, who invented HTML (Hyper-text markup language) and the first “web browser,” which enabled us to navigate the World Wide Web through the “web” of links that Tim Berners-Lee had made possible. Here is a simple exercise that demonstrates how HTML works.
Every web page has a URL or “uniform resource locator.” The reason why you can go to http://hku.hk anywhere in the world and get the same website is because the global system of domain names is governed by an international organization called ICANN. Every computer has its own unique IP address. You can purchase a domain name like rebeccamackinnon.com through domain-selling services like GoDaddy and many others. But in order to create a website located at that “address” you have to buy physical “real estate” on a computer. Your data actual does physically have to live on a computer somewhere in order to exist. Once you obtain “hosting” space on a computer server, get assigned an IP address that goes with that server space, then you have to direct your domain name to “point” to the correct IP address.
When you set up a blog on Blogger.com or Xanga or WordPress.com or Uniblogs.org where we will set up our blogs today, you don’t have to worry about any of the above (or even know anything about it), because the company “hosting” your blog is letting you share space on their domain (your blog becomes a “subdomain” of their domain name) and on one of their IP addresses.
The fact that people can now create their own personal media without having to understand any of the above – and without needing to pay anything – has revolutionized media. Hundreds of millions of people around the planet are creating various forms of online media. Media in general – and news specifically – are no longer the exclusive domains of professionals. I believe that professionals still have an important role to play in today’s news environment. But as a professional you need to make sure you are not lagging behind the average blogger when it comes to understanding how to tell stories online – and how to communicate with your audiences about those stories.
