15 years

It’s been 15 years since Tim Berners-Lee released the code for turning the Internet into a publishing medium. He called it the World Wide Web and his idea was that it should be free so anyone could use it. And just everybody did. No one really knows how big the Internet is today and it’s constantly growing. The Internet has changed our lives in most areas and today it’s hard to think about life without the Internet. The Observer continues:

The strangest thing is how casually we have come to take it for granted. We buy books from Amazon, airline tickets from Easyjet and Ryanair, tickets for theatres and cinemas online, as if doing so were the most natural thing in the world. We check the opening times at the Louvre in Paris or the Museum of Modern Art in New York (or browse their collections) online. We check definitions (and spellings) in online dictionaries, look up stuff in Wikipedia, search for apartments to rent on Craigslist or a host of local lookalikes such as Daft.ie in Ireland. You can buy and sell just about anything (excluding body parts) on eBay. Children seeking pictures for school projects search for them on Google Images (and download them without undue concern for intellectual property rights). Holiday snaps escape from their shoeboxes and is published to the world on Flickr. Home movies likewise on YouTube. And of course anyone with doubts about a prospective blind date can do an exploratory check on Google before committing to an evening out with a total stranger.

According to John Naughton and the book A brief history of the future: Origins of the Internet this is the websites that changed the world.

1. eBay.com
2. wikipedia.com
3. napster.com
4. youtube.com
5. blogger.com
6. friendsreunited.com
7. drudgereport.com
8. myspace.com
9. amazon.com
10. slashdot.org
11. salon.com
12. craigslist.org
13. google.com
14. yahoo.com
15. easyjet.com

Very interesting! What would we do without them?!