Batman Forever website, launched May 1995. If 1994 was when the Web became a publishing medium, then 1995 was when the Web truly marked itself as a unique expressive medium. The Web became a place — a destination — rather than a mere repository for documents. In previous posts, we've seen how web design elements were limited in the early years of the Web. In 1993, Jennifer Niederst Robbins used iconography to give Global Network Navigator (GNN) a sense of style, and the following year Microsoft used an image map to make its website stand out. But the layout of web pages at that time was fundamentally linear — as a user, you moved from the top of a web page to the bottom, as you scrolled down the page. That's because until Netscape introduced tables to the Web later in 1995, there wasn't a standard way to implement columns or do a grid design. Despite those layout limitations, in the first half of 1995 we saw a few websites emerge that had a pronounced visual flair — these sites felt like something to be experienced, rather than simply a collection of pages to read. The Batman Forever site was one of these new experiences. It was designed by three creatives at Grey Entertainment, a New York advertising agency. One of them, Jeffrey Zeldman, went on to become one of the Web's most influential web designers. The other two, Alec Pollak and Steve McCarron, later had successful careers in digital marketing. But in early 1995, when they were tasked with creating a website for an upcoming movie sequel, they were all inexperienced in web design. The "Batcave" web page, 1995; image via Alec Pollak. As Pollak later told it, he had only just discovered the Web — via Mosaic, of course — and had recently created his first site "with rudimentary HTML." He showed this site to his colleague Zeldman, who was a copywriter at the time. But while they were both curious about the Web, neither of them saw it as a potential creative paradise. As Zeldman later wrote, he initially viewed the Web as kind of a second-class citizen of the internet: "The first time I looked at the web, I said, “Well, this won’t succeed.” AOL was so much better—they had avatars and everything. The web looked horrible. Think about HTML websites in Netscape 1.0—it was very grim." Regardless, the trio started working on the Batman Forever site in early 1995 and right from the start, according to Zeldman, it was designed explicitly to be a place on the Web: "Together, we conceived of Gotham as the site's ruling metaphor, with content linked to appropriate buildings in the cityscape (e.g. text files in the library, bulletin boards and e-mail in the post office), and those buildings themselves as navigational icons." The homepage was cinematically visual. It had a dark background and centering the page was a stylized image of a gothic-looking cityscape — painted in yellow, red and purple — with the text "Welcome to Gotham" splashed in large computer-green capital letters above it. Below was a menu, styled to look like a row of buildings. Batman Forever homepage, 1995; image via Alec Pollak. The release of Netscape 1.1 in March 1995 inspired one of the main features of the site: full-screen backgrounds using repeating image tiles. The era of grey backgrounds was now well and truly behind us! Server-push images were used for animation and an image map linked "different parts of an image to different places," Pollak later explained. The site even made use of video, despite the constraints that Zeldman later described: "We had videos the size of a postage stamp that were 3MB and back then, you couldn’t stream—you had to download video. There was no Flash or animated GIFs yet, but we hired Doug Rice at Interactive8, a very early digital studio in New York, to write a Perl script that would replace one image with the next to give the effect that a bat was flying toward the viewer. Nobody had ever seen anything like that on the web." Gotham Cinema web page, 1995; image via Alec Pollak. The Batman Forever website was a big part of the marketing campaign for the film, which was released a few weeks after the site, on June 16, 1995. But although the site was unusually visual and impressive for the time, the tie-in between movies and the internet wasn't that unusual. Three big-budget movies were released in 1995 with internet themes: the Keanu Reeves flick Johnny Mnemonic in May, The Net with Sandra Bullock in July, and Hackers in September. (Two other 1995 movies had a virtual reality premise: Virtuosity, starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, and Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days.) So the Web was becoming a part of mainstream culture that year. The reviews for the Batman Forever site picked up on what made it different from other websites. In a review dated May 8, 1995, Interactive Age noted that it was "a collection of Web pages as experiential as they are informative." There was a hint of choose your own adventure to the site, like a CD-ROM or a HyperCard game. According to Interactive Age: "Unlike most promotions on the Web, the site features more than advertising copy. "Batman Forever" employs a narrative with unseen twists and hidden pages that users can discover by answering a series of concealed riddles posed by Batman's nemesis, the Riddler." The Riddler's island lair; image via Alec Pollak. That web design was beginning to shift from a publishing format to one with a more cinematic scope was made explicit in the review: "Where other popular sites on the Net - including "Batman's" parent, Pathfinder - employ a magazine metaphor, the "Batman Forever" site relies on a cinematic vision of its environs. Users navigate a virtual skyline of Gotham, visiting such buildings as the post office, radio station, art gallery, library and movie theater." It's worth pointing out, though, that the technical limitations of the time — slow broadband and relatively primitive personal computers — meant that the Batman Forever site wasn't always a pleasant experience. As Point Communications noted in its review, "All this graphic glory comes at a price: 14.4s [modem speed] and below will find themselves waiting. For the most part, it's worth it." Gotham Gallery; image via Alec Pollak. Table layouts debut True layout control for web designers finally arrived in September 1995, when Netscape Navigator 2.0 introduced tables layout. Now designers could easily add columns to their pages, which led to navigation sidebars, sectioned off headers, and better positioning of images. Netscape Navigator 2.0 also introduced frames, another method to divide a page into different sections. Microsoft's Internet Explorer was a little slower to support HTML table rendering, but it arrived in the fall of 1995 with IE 1.5 for Windows NT. Tables were a new feature in the draft HTML 3.0 specification being worked on at this time, led by the W3C's Dave Raggett. "Borderless tables are useful for layout purposes as well as their traditional role for tabular data," noted the draft spec, in the typical dry style of such documents. By the way, tables are another example of browser vendors being always ahead of the current HTML spec, because HTML 2.0 was only made official in November 1995 — and tables weren't a part of that document. CNN.com, 1995; via Web Design Museum. A good example of a tables layout in late-1995 was HotWired, the website of the popular internet culture magazine, Wired. One of the designers, Jeffrey Veen, later wrote that "there was a strong debate about using tables for layout." Although the HotWired team all understood that HTML was a language that defined structure, they concluded that "the benefits to design outweighed purist argument." Phil Gyford, who worked at Wired UK at this time, later put up a demo copy of HotWired from November 1995. It shows a 3-column layout. HotWired tables design, Novermber 1995; via Phil Gyford. Arrival of WYSIWYG tools With new layout capabilities like tables and frames becoming available in late-1995, designers began to have a need for better tools to help them create web pages. In October 1995, a small company called Vermeer released FrontPage, a "visual authoring tool for creating, maintaining, and administering whole web sites". This product caught the attention of Microsoft, then in the midst of its internet transformation — and by January 1996, Vermeer had been acquired. Also in late 1995, Adobe released its visual authoring tool, PageMill. According to a review in the Society of Cartographers Bulletin, PageMill brought WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) layout editing to the Web. The reviewer called it "an invaluable tool to start exploring the possibilities of layout and design." However, they also noted that PageMill did not yet support visual design of HTML tables. FrontPage 1.0 in 1995; via Web Design Museum. The first version of FrontPage also had just rudimentary support for tables — you had to edit the HTML code to achieve a table layout. So clearly there was room for these tools to grow before being truly user-friendly to web designers. Nonetheless, it was encouraging that non-coding design tools like FrontPage and PageMill were coming onto the market by the end of 1995. In the next two articles in Cybercultural's history of web design, we'll look at the influence of two specific web designers in 1995. Do subscribe if you'd like to follow along; and please share this article on social media if you're enjoying the series (I'm @ricmac on Mastodon, Bluesky and LinkedIn).

Netscape's browser project was codenamed Mozilla during 1994; via Macintosh Garden. If web design is not yet a profession in 1993 because of the technical limitations of HTML and early browsers, then 1994 is the year web authors start asking the question: why can't we control formatting and presentation? At this point, the leading browser vendors — first Mosaic and then Netscape — see layout as their responsibility. What little was possible in visual design for website authors in 1994 is dictated by the capabilities of Mosaic and the newly launched Netscape Navigator. As the year progresses, sites grow slightly more sophisticated in their use of images and graphical icons, but authors still cannot choose fonts or control background colour. And while tables appear as an experimental layout feature in some browsers by late 1994, they don't become a practical design tool until 1995. Netscape What's New, 1994; via YouTube. Should browsers define layout? At the start of 1994, there was general acknowledgment amongst the participants of the WWW-Talk mailing list that web authors had limited control of layout and presentation — it simply wasn't specified in HTML at the time. So in the absense of styling controls in HTML, early browsers implemented their own presentation ideas. On February 17, 1994, Mosaic's Marc Andreessen left the following comment after a user complained about "an extra blank line" on his HTML menu: "It's not a bug -- it's a rendering choice made by the browser. As we kneel before the altar of the "ha ha, you can't control what your documents look like in HTML" philosophy, you, dear sinner (nay, blasphemer), can but take solace in the fact that Mosaic is putting a blank line at the start of all toplevel lists, including yours, entirely on purpose. (Why? Primarily because we thought that looked the best for most documents on the Web at the time, as I remember.)" Although Andreessen's tone was snarky, he had a point: if HTML won't specify how a document should look, then it's up to browsers to make those decisions. HTML was never designed to be a formatting language; its purpose was (and still is) to define the structure of a web page. Indeed, Tim Berners-Lee wrote in his 2025 memoir that he originally viewed HTML as "plumbing" for the Web. Yahoo! was founded in 1994, and here's what its website looked like in late-94; via Jason Kottke. Even in early 1994, there were active discussions about introducing "style sheets" to the Web. This wasn't a new idea, either. As the W3C's Bert Bos wrote many years later: "The separation of document structure from the document's layout had been a goal of HTML from its inception in 1990. Tim Berners-Lee wrote his NeXT browser/editor in such a way that he could determine the style with a simple style sheet. However, he didn't publish the syntax for the style sheets, considering it a matter for each browser to decide how to best display pages to its users." Perhaps that explains why Marc Andreessen was skeptical about style sheets. On February 28, 1994, he complained that "style sheets are an artificial construct inflicted on us because of the whole non-presentation philosophy we've been using." His point was that browsers should continue to handle layout and that a new styling language would add too much complexity. Others on the WWW-Talk list disagreed. Mark Fisher argued that "attaching style sheets to documents would allow authors to get their message across in the format they intended" and would reduce the "typographical errors" users were seeing. The shift to web publishing These arguments over web standards can look dry and pendantic when read many years later, but what they demonstrate is a real desire for the Web to be more than a system for sharing documents. It was becoming clear that users of the Web in 1994 increasingly saw it as a new publishing medium, which meant a need for design tools. During the second half of 1994, traditional publishers began experimenting on the web. This is TIME magazine's website in October 1994; via Boardwatch magazine. The momentum to add style sheets grew during the second quarter of 1994, as WWW-Talk members pushed back against the idea that browsers should control layout. In summarizing a recent standards meeting, Yechezkal-Shimon Gutfreund noted in May that "many people would like to have more control over the actual rendering of the document (alignment, font size, tabbing, highlight color, etc, etc.)" Rob Raisch agreed, pointing out that style sheets were very important for the future of web publishing: "Tools like Mosaic are only really useful to the end-user. They support few of the requirements a publisher looks for in a publishing platform." Although some people supported Andreessen's stance to keep it simple, a consensus was slowly forming to give web publishers better ways to control formatting. Chris Lilley, a computer scientist who would go on to co-author the graphics formats PNG and SVG, argued on the WWW-HTML mailing list that it was entirely reasonable "to have some control over formatting AS WELL AS sending searchable, parsable text." In other words, he didn't view having control over the design of a web page as being incompatible with machine-readable text. While the Web's primary purpose was to be a global hypertext system, that didn't mean it couldn't look good too. In a follow-up, Lilley noted "that commercial sites want a corporate look, an image, and are prepared to pay real money to get it." The Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) website in 1994, showing what was possible using colorful graphics and minimal HTML; image via David Beach and Jeff Patterson. CSS proposed and Netscape launches October 1994 was a key month for the now fast-growing Web. On October 10, 1994, a new styling standard was proposed by Håkon Wium Lie, a colleague of Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. Lie called his proposal "Cascading HTML style sheets" and wrote that the goal was to provide "a simple mapping between HTML elements and presentation hints." The word "cascade" referenced an ordered list of style sheets, which was Lie's way of giving the end-user some control over formatting — for example, a sight-impaired user might want to make the text on a web page much larger than the author had declared. Håkon Wium Lie, writing on X in October 2024, thirty years after he proposed CSS: "the @CERN office where CSS was first created in 1994. I shared it with @timberners_lee and Henrik Frystyk Nielsen. You can see Tim's Next machine in the middle, my Sun workstation on the left." Lie's proposal came out around the time of the launch of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a new governing body for the Web led by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. Also in this month, Netscape — a new company formed by Andreessen and Jim Clark in April — launched a beta version of its first product, a web browser initially called Mosaic Netscape 0.9 (later renamed Netscape Navigator). There was a delicate balance between the growth of web standards, now being managed by the W3C, and the launch of new commercial companies like Netscape. But as more and more people started using the Web, inevitably they tended to use the most popular web browser — Mosaic, in either its original form or the new Netscape version. Both these products still only supported basic HTML elements (HTML 2.0 was a new proposal under discussion at this point) and style sheets weren't anywhere close to being in the picture. That was the problem with web standards: they took years to be formalized, and thus supported. Netscape browser, 1994; screenshot via YouTube. Website design in 1994 By the end of 1994, there were roughly 10,000 websites on the web. It was still early days and most of the websites were quite basic in structure. The Solstice website for the Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology (CREST) in Switzerland is a good example. The layout is very simple, since tables weren't an option yet, but there are some nice graphics at the top of the page that give the page a splash of color. At the bottom of the Solstice homepage, there is even a graphical menu system — using the traditional "Index" and "Next" navigation system. But note that the typography is basic; this is because authors couldn't choose which fonts their pages would render in. Some of the more adventurous websites of 1994 used more graphics, but they were still quite primitive in terms of layout. An unofficial website for The Rolling Stones is a good example. The site, stones.com, had been created by some tech-savvy fans from MIT, along with the computer software company Sun Microsystems. According to the launch announcement in September 1994: “With the help of Sun Microsystems Inc., Thinking Pictures [an MIT spinoff] has put the Rolling Stones on-line, creating their own electronic "home page," a user-friendly graphical interface for navigating information across the global Internet.” Although it wasn’t an official website, Thinking Pictures CEO Stephan Fitch told media that “the site has the blessings of the Stones.” The graphical interface mainly consisted of small icons, many using familiar images (a CD icon for the "Albums" page, etc.). But there were a few custom-made icons too — notably the famous Rolling Stones tongue for the home page. The stones.com website had been built by Björn Tromsdorf, whose personal homepage further showcased his icon designs. It also featured a typical 1994 design pattern for personal websites: a pixelated photo followed by your name in headline text (just as common would've been to write "Björn's Home Page"). One of the most innovative website designs of 1994 was Microsoft's homepage, which used an image map for its navigation system. In a reconstruction of the site in 2014, the web design firm Paravel commented: "It's a very simple site, but recreating the Image Map navigation was the biggest piece of the puzzle. The image was excellently recreated by Dan Schlitzkus. We converted it to a GIF, but it's possible it could have been an X-BitMap which was in use around the time." 2014 reconstruction of Microsoft homepage in 1994; via Wayback Machine. Paravel deduced that the original page likely used a server-side CGI image map using the <IMG ISMAP> attribute, part of the HTML 2.0 draft specification that was being hammered out over 1994. Paravel's Dave Rupert later told Creative Bloq that "replicating the original Microsoft.com homepage after helping redesign its modern counterpart felt like restoring an old Mustang." I'll have more online Mustangs to show off in the next post in Cybercultural's history of web design (1993-2012), so stay tuned and subscribe to be notified if you haven't already.

DavidBowie.com, January 8, 2013. After 2004, the rise of the social web — and especially platforms like MySpace and Facebook — made niche social networks like BowieNet less relevant in the culture. This shift coincided with the slow decline of BowieNet itself. The portal and ISP had launched in 1998 and had two major redesigns (in 2000 and 2003), but when David Bowie suffered a heart attack during the Reality world tour in 2004 — leading to a long period of inactivity in the music industry — his website fell into a kind of stasis too. Slowly, BowieNet was dismantled. In 2006, the ISP service was quietly shut down — most likely because UltraStar, its corporate owner (in which Bowie was a shareholder) had pivoted to become an online fan club business. In an April 2006 press release touting a new partnership with Ticketmaster, UltraStar described its offering as “community-based subscription clubs delivered over the web.” As well as Bowie, its clients at this time included Sting, Counting Crows, INXS, Mariah Carey, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and The Rolling Stones. UltraStar website, Bowie profile, 2006. Via Wayback Machine. Sometime in 2006, Live Nation — at the time just an events promoter — acquired a controlling interest in Ultrastar, and by September 2007 it had bought the remaining shares. Live Nation was buying up a lot of small music-related companies at this time, leading to its 2010 merger with Ticketmaster, which turned it into a full-fledged industry gorilla. So UltraStar was now just a tiny part of a multinational. Not coincidentally, there were fewer and fewer updates to BowieNet during this time — and certainly no more redesigns. The site continued to promote Bowie re-issues and merch, as well as providing commentary on Bowie’s rare public appearances. But it had lost its vitality, and Bowie himself seemed to have lost interest in the site. Fast-forward to 2012 and, incredibly, davidbowie.com still has the now 9-year-old Flash design of the Reality era. Flash was very much in decline as a web technology by this point — indeed, Apple stopped supporting Flash Player on its iOS devices in 2010, so Bowie’s website would have been at least partly inaccessible to iPhone owners. The content was just as outdated. “David’s Welcome Message” was still promoting the Reality album and world tour, while the “What’s New” section had stopped like an old clock on May 24, 2010. David Bowie's website at the end of 2012 — little had changed since 2003. On March 15, 2012, the official David Bowie Facebook page formally announced what was plainly obvious: "the old Bowienet, as we have known it, is kaput!” Whoever wrote this (and it certainly wasn’t the man himself) added that they had “no access to either the message boards or our newsletter service." Facebook was the platform most likely to reach the biggest number of Bowie fans, so that’s why the closure of BowieNet was confirmed there. The post promised a new website, but it would be “a basic version to primarily deliver news.” Existing BowieNet members would regain access to their email and message boards, but new member signups would be discontinued. Bowie Facebook Page, March 2012. It was mostly used for nostalgic fan posts. Bowie himself did not use Facebook. It was the end of an era. Meanwhile, many Bowie fan sites had also either stopped updating or gone offline altogether. Like BowieNet, Teenage Wildlife was still stuck in 2003 — its homepage in March 2012 featured news about the upcoming Reality tour and there was little sign of life elsewhere on the site. Another long-time Bowie fan site, Stefan Bassman’s David Bowie Page, had largely stopped updating by 2006. Its proprietor, Stefan Westman, had also run The David Bowie Web Ring — a Geocities website that ran right up until Geocities itself was shut down by Yahoo, in October 2009. As for David Bowie himself, from 2004 to the announcement on his Facebook page in March 2012, he'd made only sporadic public appearances. One noteworthy instance was receiving a “Lifetime Achievement Award” from The Webbys in 2007, the so-called “Oscars of the internet.” The award was for “pushing the boundaries of art and technology with his digital empire," including BowieNet and UltraStar. Bowie was just the second musician to receive the lifetime achievement award, a year after Prince. David Bowie accepting his Webby Award in NYC on June 3, 2007. Via Webbys website. And that was it for Bowie’s involvement with the internet, including his own website. Right up until January 8, 2013 — his 66th birthday — when davidbowie.com unexpectedly came to life again. The Next Day News spread fast on Facebook and Twitter that Bowie had released his first new music in nearly a decade, with no pre-publicity. It was a single, “Where are we now?”, along with the impending release of a new album, The Next Day. As long-time fan Dara O’Kearney put it, Bowie had ”simply put the new song up at his website, and the world went crazy.” Finally, the Reality-era Flash design of davidbowie.com was banished. There was now a new splash page — not Flash, but plain old HTML and images — advertising the new releases. The primary image was of Bowie’s face obscured by a large grey square, mirroring the album cover. There was a link to the single’s video on Vimeo, along with links to buy the single and pre-order the album on iTunes. “Welcome to the relaunched DavidBowie.com and a whole bunch of exciting new things that you've no doubt already found on the splash page,” announced the site. Relaunch blog post; January 8, 2013. BowieNet was no more, but the website was back…David Bowie was back! The sudden, surprise release of the album was seemingly a counter-intuitive move in the always-on age of social media. But keeping news of the album — which had been worked on for about two years — out of the chattering fingers of smartphone owners turned out to be a master stroke. The news of Bowie’s return dominated Twitter, Facebook and other social media services when it was announced on January 8, 2013. This “album drop” tactic was later adopted by other major artists, like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. The secrecy around the album even extended to the reasons why the website was being redesigned, after so many years of neglect. “We worked on his new website and couldn’t tell the programmers why it was being restyled,” said graphic designer Jonathan Barnbrook, who was in charge of both the album cover and the web design. “All along the way, we had to lie to people about our reasons for doing things.” After clicking through from the splash page, January 8, 2013. Via Wayback Machine. Much had changed in the media landscape since the release of Reality in 2003. Back then there were no smartphones or tablets, no YouTube or Spotify, and no Twitter or Facebook. But a decade later, everybody had a voice (although the downside was that nobody listened to each other). Now you could consume media everywhere you went, and comment on anything at any time. So how did the man himself adapt to this new era of ubiquitous internet? One can imagine a millennial version of Ziggy Stardust with his own YouTube channel and daily poses on Instagram. But no, 66-year old David Bowie took the complete opposite approach. He turned into late-era Greta Garbo, refusing to do interviews and not having a social media presence. “The silence is part of it,” said Gerry Leonard, one of the guitarists on The Next Day. “He’s letting the record come out, letting the artwork out, letting the video out. In his mind, those are the artistic statements – not getting on the phone with everybody and setting it up with all kinds of chatter.” The official Bowie Twitter account in January 2013, at which point it was simply syndicating the Facebook Page feed. The Next Day was officially released on March 8, 2013. Coincidentally, a couple of months after that, the French electronic duo Daft Punk released their first album in 8 years: Random Access Memories. This album, named after a form of computer memory, commonly referred to as RAM — directly commented on the digital age and was an artistic response to it. As the music critic Simon Reynolds wrote in a review: “Spurning the digital audio software that empowers the EDM [Electronic Dance Music] generation, the album is an analogue flashback to the era of live musicianship, involving a crack squad of session players and contributions from disco legends Nile Rodgers and Giorgio Moroder.” The presence of Nile Rodgers on RAM provided a thin connection to David Bowie, since Rodgers had produced Let’s Dance 30 years prior. But more to the point, it’s in their contrary ways of dealing with an all-encompassing digital life that ties Daft Punk and Bowie together, at least in their 2013 guises. Reynolds later characterised RAM as Daft Punk’s “falling out of digital love,” adding that “if Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories comes to define 2013, it’ll be through rejecting 2013.” With Bowie, it wasn’t so much that he rejected the digital life, but that he wanted it to conform to him — not the other way around, as it was (and still is) for the rest of us. Blackstar By the time of Blackstar, released on his 69th birthday on January 8, 2016, Bowie was on a different plane. “Dropped my cell phone down below,” he sang on the song “Lazarus.” He knew there was no use for cell phones, or the internet, where he was headed: Look up here, I'm in heaven Front page of DavidBowie.com, January 8, 2016. David Bowie died two days later, on January 10, 2016. Everything changed after that. World politics took a bizarre turn, climate change ramped up, the pandemic hit, global conflicts escalated, AI emerged. As humanity roiled in chaos, the internet became ever-more controlled — increasingly under the thumb of Big Tech platforms. As Green Day later put it in a song, “ever since Bowie died, it hasn’t been the same” (from their 2024 song, “Strange Days Are Here to Stay”). Bowie's website, the day after his death on January 10, 2016. Via Wayback Machine. Near the end of 2016, on a chilly Saturday night, I attended a showing of the Lazarus stage show at the King's Cross Theatre in London. Accompanying me were my wife and fifteen-year old daughter. In truth, I was much more looking forward to the show than they were — being a long-time Bowie fan and with his death in January still front of mind for me. Alongside his album Blackstar, the musical Lazarus was the last creative thing Bowie had been involved in. He’d always wanted to produce a stage show, going back to the time in 1974 when he tried to stage a retelling of George Orwell’s 1984 (he couldn’t get the rights, but he turned that idea into the Diamond Dogs album and tour). Over forty years later, he and Dublin playwright Enda Walsh wrote Lazarus: a sequel to ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’, the 1976 film he’d starred in playing an alien called Thomas Newton. Lazarus musical; image via westendtheatre.com via Wayback Machine. Although the stage show continued the general themes of the film — alienation, lost love, numbing yourself with TV and alcohol — it was more opaque. Some of the play takes place inside Newton’s mind, and we as the audience are unsure which characters are real and which are invented by Newton. Certainly I was confused watching it in London in December 2016 (and my teenage daughter tuned out, surreptitiously pulling out her iPhone during the performance). But visually it was stunning, and I was impressed by the songs; especially Newton actor Michael C. Hall’s performance of the title song. This way or no way, you know I'll be free The play had begun its run off-Broadway in December 2015, a month before Bowie’s death, and initially critics were baffled. The New York Times called it a “great-sounding, great-looking and mind-numbing new musical built around songs by David Bowie.” The Guardian’s reviewer said it was “almost incomprehensible” yet “oddly intriguing.” But when I saw the show a year later, it was difficult to separate Bowie’s legend from the Newton character. Even if I didn’t understand the plot, Bowie’s death had lent an extra layer of pathos to proceedings. When Newton speaks these lines near the end of the play, I found myself tearing up: “I’m done with this life — so a new universe I’ll dream big up there. And although always stuck inside this breaking mind — I’ve stepped off this Earth and into that better place. An imagined world.” But what a life it had been, down here on earth. Yes, Bowie’s creative star had shone brightest during his youth, in the 1970s. Then he conquered MTV and the mainstream pop world in the early 1980s. But every good play needs a third act, and for David Bowie that was the 1990s and early 2000s — played out in parallel with the emergence of digital culture. Bowie had dabbled in CD-ROMs, tapped into the internet zeitgeist for his most innovative album in years (1995’s Outside), was among the first artists to release music online, did a “cybercast” concert before it was even technically feasible, and — most impressively of all — built an online community for his fans in 1998, years before social media arrived. Through it all, he had used the internet as a tool to further expand his art and deepen his connection to his fans. David Bowie in the video for Blackstar. Via Bowie YouTube channel. The 1990s and early 2000s were a time of great change for all of us, as the world transformed from analogue to digital. But nowadays, “down below,” many of us use the internet as a crutch. We’re hooked on algorithmic news feeds, our smartphones too easily accessible to give us a dopamine hit when the need arises — which is frequently, given the state of the world around us. Let’s not forget, though, that the internet can also be a well of inspiration and meaningful connection. We live in a virtualized world now, that can’t be denied. But that doesn’t mean we should abandon our creative impulses, or our willingness to adapt — to change in response to the times. To create change in the world, even. Because if there’s one thing we can all learn from David Bowie’s life, it’s to “turn and face the strange.” Perhaps Bowie’s final message to us, in the title track of his last album Blackstar, was that you can be your own star. You’re a force of nature too. You can have eagles in your daydreams and diamonds in your eyes. You can be a blackstar, just like him. Something happened on the day he died This is part of a series about the history of BowieNet and David Bowie's website: 1995-1997: David Bowie’s Early Websites: Outside to Earthling 1996: Telling Lies; Bowie and Online Music Distribution 1996-1998: BowieNet, The Inside Story of Its Creation 1998: Launch of BowieNet and the First Inklings of Social Networks 2000: BowieNet Version 2 and its Karma System 2003: BowieNet Version 3, a Flash Reality After BowieNet, David Bowie Goes Dark and Shuns Social Media

KaZaA, one of many P2P file sharing services in 2002. In June 2002, Pew Research Center released a report on broadband uptake. It stated that 21% of all Internet users in America — 24 million adults — now had broadband in the home, up from just 6% two years ago. Of course, broadband penetration would continue to trend upward over the coming years. But even in 2002, Pew claimed that the internet had morphed from a "sometimes" tool for communication and finding information to an "always-on information appliance." This change in the character of the internet around 2002 led to the other trends we'll look at in this post: more interactive websites, more online music choices, more socializing on the web. A BBC report in January 2002 about broadband. Web Design: Flash to CSS One website that illustrates well the shift to a broadband sensibility in 2002 was MTV.com. Unlike some multimedia-heavy websites from that year, it didn't rely too heavily on Flash technology. If anything, it was a traditional HTML portal that made extensive use of tables and image buttons for layout. The site was rich in streaming media, though — including on-demand music videos, radio streams, and broadband-only content. This was typically delivered via RealPlayer and Windows Media plugins, rather than Flash. MTV homepage, 8 August 2002. However, Flash and Shockwave — both popular Adobe multimedia technologies — were used heavily for MTV's tv show microsites and its interactive promos. One example was an interactive microsite for The Osbournes, built using Shockwave: Watch Video on YouTube MTV also had community member profiles, which in hindsight looks like a prototype for MySpace (which would launch the following year). Only instead of blogs, it was message boards; and the emphasis was on collecting lists of bands and MTV shows, rather than collecting friends. But if you squint, you can see social networks taking shape. An MTV community member, June 2002. Note that this person is already castigating MTV for not playing enough music! It wasn't all about multimedia on the web in 2002. Web standards were also becoming increasingly popular with web designers; and in particular the "tableless CSS" design. Wired launched a big CSS-based redesign in October 2002. Blogger Adrian Holovaty wrote: "In a tremendous win for Web standards and modern Web technologies such as XHTML, the site now uses an all-CSS layout. The site's announcement says it "may be the first major, heavily trafficked, constantly updated site to adopt [Web standards]." [...] the site's reliance on style sheets opens the door to many innovations -- such as dynamic text resizing, which the site has already implemented." Lead designer Douglas Bowman noted that all pages now "rely entirely on CSS for every design, format, and presentation detail." Wired's 2002 CSS redesign; image via Doug Bowman's StopDesign. Blogosphere Rises Speaking of beautiful web designs, over 2002 blogging became a thriving ecosystem of colourful personal sites that interconnected to each other via RSS, trackback and blogrolls. Blogging software by this time was both sophisticated and relatively easy to use. In its version 2.51, Movable Type had multiple template options, entry categorization, built-in comments, a new feature called "trackback," and more. The original mainstream blog platform, Blogger, was also still going strong. Other blog software options included Radio Userland, LiveJournal and Xanga. Tom Coates' PlasticBag was one of the more visually impressive blogs of this era. In an influential article on Microcontent News, John Hiler popularized the notion of a "blogosphere," which he defined as an "emerging media ecosystem." Hiler gave the credit for coining the word to William Quick, who first used it at the end of 2001. But Hiler was the one who positioned blogs in the larger media ecosystem: "The word was meant as a clever pun combining "Blog" with "logos", a Greek word meaning logic and reason. And while bloggers do often use logic in dissecting arguments, I love the word Blogosphere because it happens to capture another truth: the Blogosphere is a biosphere of its own, a Media Ecosystem that lives and breathes just like any other biological system." John Hiler's blogosphere diagram. Post-Napster P2P Chaos Napster was effectively cancelled in 2001 due to lawsuits from the record industry. But by 2002, even more decentralised peer-to-peer (P2P) services had arisen to take its place: KaZaA, Gnutella (which powered clients like LimeWire and Morpheus), eDonkey2000 (with its eMule client), BitTorrent, and others. It was these services that people flocked to for MP3s, not the sanctioned apps of record companies. The P2P ecosystem was a chaotic one in 2002. Let's quickly look at KaZaA, a desktop client built on top of FastTrack — a P2P protocol developed by a group of Estonian programmers led by Jaan Tallinn. This protocol later became the foundation of Skype, one of the standout applications of Web 2.0. But back in 2002, during the wild west of P2P music sharing, KaZaA had its hands full fending off record company lawsuits and competitors like Morpheus. KaZaA homepage in August 2002; by this time it had reached 100 million downloads. Morpheus had originally used FastTrack, but was kicked off the network in February and subsequently moved to the open source Gnutella protocol. A March 2002 article from The Register captures the utter chaos of this time: "Music City [owner of Morpheus] pointed the finger of blame towards KaZaA.com (recently acquired by Sharman Network Services), which like MusicCity's Morpheus and Grokster has licensed the FastTrack P2P stack. MusicCity described FastTrack-KaZaA software as a security risk (or a vector for spyware). Not so, says FastTrack-KaZaA. KaZaA founder Niklas Zennstrom told CNet that StreamCast Networks, the firm behind Music City Morpheus, had failed to pay its bills, so the license for its P2P stack was terminated." The Register added later in the article that "both Morpheus and KaZaA are embroiled in copyright violation lawsuits brought against them by the music industry." Kazaa Lite, an unofficial third-party client, gained popularity after spyware accusations against KaZaA. But as you can see, it experienced various problems too. Meanwhile, on the back of releasing the second generation iPod in August, Apple set out to create a legal alternative to the illicit music file sharing scene. But to do that, Steve Jobs would have to convince the five major record labels —  Universal, Warner, EMI, BMG, and Sony — to take part in its upcoming iTunes Store. This took him over a year to accomplish. iPod generation 2 tech specs; via Wayback Machine. Also in 2002, we saw the launches of last.fm and Audioscrobbler, two services that would eventually merge and give the online music ecosystem a social component. A Phoenix Arises in an IE6 Web By 2002, Microsoft was in total control of the web browser market. Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) had been released in August 2001 and was at or near its peak by 2002, with an estimated market share of nearly 90% — other versions of IE added 5% to that figure. With such dominance, there was little reason for Microsoft to continue pushing forward on browser technology (there would be no IE7 until 2006). The only hope for further innovation was in Mozilla, the non-profit organization spun off by Netscape in 1998. But its progress towards a new browser was slow. Mozilla 1.0 was eventually released on June 5, 2002. Part of the delay was that Mozilla 1.0 wasn't just a web browser, it was a full application suite: "Built on the Gecko layout engine, Mozilla 1.0 is cross-platform and integrates a core set of applications that allow users to access the capabilities of the Web, including a web browser, an email reader and a chat client. Gecko is the core browser component in Mozilla 1.0 and was developed as part of the mozilla.org open source project; it is freely available for inclusion in third party products." Some Mozilla developers disliked the bloat of Mozilla 1.0, so they began development on a single browser app — which also used the Gecko layout engine. This was the beginnings of Firefox; and on 23 September 2002, an early version called Phoenix 0.1 was released. Finally, it looked like the slumbering browser market would wake up. What would become Firefox emerged out of a project begun in 2002; image via CNET.

Apple iTunes, the Rip Mix Burn advert, 2001; via YouTube (video embedded below). The year 2001 began with optimism — in January, Wikipedia debuted and Apple launched iTunes. But by year’s end the mood had shifted. The dot-com crash had drained Silicon Valley’s exuberance, Napster was being dismantled in court, and the new wave of post-9/11 “warblogs” made the internet feel solemn and overly serious. Meanwhile, Microsoft continued its dominance over the web with the release of Internet Explorer 6. Despite the doom and gloom, 2001 was also a year in which the web continued to mature. It gained a memory through Wikipedia and the Wayback Machine, discovered new voices through blogs and communities like MetaFilter, and began to legitmately shake up the cultural industries with iTunes and the iPod. Watch Video on YouTube Wikipedia and Wayback Wikipedia launched on January 15 as a side project of Nupedia, an encyclopedia which required scholars to submit articles for expert review. Wikipedia, by contrast, was wide open: anyone could edit. Inspired by Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb software, Wikipedia published a thousand articles in its first month; by the end of the year, more than 20,000. By comparison, Nupedia had published fewer than 24 articles in the year before Wikipedia launched. Wikipedia homepage, 17 May 2001. Larry Sanger, one of the co-founders of Wikipedia alongside Jimmy Wales, later wrote that the initial idea "was that the wiki would be set up as part of Nupedia; it was to be a way for the public to develop a stream of content that could be fed into the Nupedia process." But Wikipedia soon became the main project and "Nupedia withered due to neglect." Key to Wikipedia's momentum — and subsequent success — was its lack of hierarchical structure; but as Sanger pointed out, this had good and bad implications: "...this provisional "hands off" management policy had the effect of creating a difficult-to-change tradition, the tradition of making the project extremely tolerant of disruptive (uncooperative, "trolling") behavior. And as it turned out, particularly with the large waves of new contributors from the summer and fall of 2001, the project became very resistant to any changes in this policy." Somehow, despite the chaos and occassional bad behaviour of participants, Wikipedia quickly established itself as the web's encyclopedia. Wikipedia's "welcome, newcomers" page, 6 April 2001. Note that Nupedia was being promoted at this point as the "much more rigorous and serious" project. Nine months after Wikipedia's launch, another tool for memory arrived: the Wayback Machine, launched publicly by the Internet Archive in October 2001. It was a kind of time travel for websites: you entered a URL and an earlier version would display. The Wayback Machine wasn’t perfect: broken images, missing scripts, frames gone askew. Nevertheless, it gave the web a sense of permanence, even as so many dot-coms were disappearing. Wayback Machine soon after its public launch in October 2001. IE6 and Microsoft's Web Power When Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) was released in August 2001, it was bundled with Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows XP. By this point, IE was by far the most dominant browser — Netscape was now in the single figures in market share and the debut of Mozilla's open source Firefox browser was still a few years away. At first glance, IE6 didn't seem that impressive. Paul Thurrott's contemporary review put it plainly: "When compared to previous IE versions, IE 6 doesn't offer many new features, aside from an XP-like user interface, some digital media-related improvements, and support for Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) technologies that, as far as I can tell, isn't even used by very many Web sites anyway." IE6 webpage, September 2001. But compared to its competitors — which included the open source Mozilla 0.9.4 — IE6 was more stable (less crashes) and faster. More than anything, IE was the browser that most websites were developed for. As Thurrott put it: "IE 6 comes up a winner primarily because of its sheer ubiquitousness. When you browse the Web, you transparently understand that virtually every site on the Web is going to display properly with this browser, because Web developers simply can't ignore the market leader. For the bullet point crowd, Microsoft says that it supports a variety of Web standards, including Dynamic HTML (DHTML), CSS Level 1, HTML Document Object Model (DOM) Level 1, XML, and so on. Frankly, this list doesn't compare very favorably to that of Mozilla, say, but then IE 6 is still more compatible with actual Web sites, so I'm not sure that such a comparison matters much in the real world." In hindsight, we can say that IE6 froze the web in time — designers began coding specifically for it, which suppressed innovation. The Mozilla browser was a promising development, but it was too bloated and buggy in late-2001. It would eventually be transformed into Firefox, but that process would take a few more years to play out. A graphic from Mozilla's roadmap circa September 2001. iTunes and iPod If 2000 had been the year of Napster, then 2001 was the year of Apple's "digital lifestyle." In January, Apple released iTunes 1.0 for Mac OS; a clean, drag-and-drop music library that gave MP3s a sheen of legitimacy. It wasn’t a store yet, just an organiser and CD ripper. iTunes 2001; via CNET. While Apple was positioning itself as the savior of online music, Napster’s fate was sealed in court. In February, a federal appeals panel upheld an injunction requiring it to block copyrighted songs; by July, Napster temporarily shut down. Some users migrated to Gnutella or the newly released BitTorrent protocol, but legal options were becoming more viable. Especially when Apple introduced the iPod in October. The iPod's slogan — “1,000 songs in your pocket” — signaled that online music had finally been untethered from the PC. At first the iPod was Mac-only and expensive, but the combination of iTunes and iPod hinted at a new era: personal, portable, and, soon, monetised. The wild-west days of mass file sharing of music were effectively over. iPod webpage, October 2001. Blogging Expands At the beginning of 2001, most popular weblogs were a combination of personal journal and linkblog — a format encouraged by early blogging tools like Blogger, LiveJournal and Diaryland. But by the end of the year, blogging had become a real-time reporting tool too; most notably in the form of the “warblogs” that became popular after 9/11, like Talking Points Memo, Instapundit and Daily Dish. Warblogger Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, 17 September 2009. The October launch of Movable Type was also a key moment in the professionalisation of blogging. Created by Ben and Mena Trott, it was a revelation for bloggers who wanted more control over their sites. MT supported multiple blogs from one installation, allowed full template customization, and generated static HTML pages — improving both speed and reliability. Crucially, it also supported RSS feeds out of the box (even by the end of 2001, RSS wasn't a default feature in Blogger). Movable Type, 9 September 2001. By late 2001, RSS was spreading across the web, in particular via tech-focused blogs like Boing Boing and DiveIntoMark. Alongside RSS came new experiments in blog infrastructure. In July 2001, MIT researcher Cameron Marlow launched Blogdex, a tool that tracked the most-linked URLs across thousands of weblogs. Blogdex, 30 November 2001; via Wayback Machine. The Bust & Looking Ahead As 2001 drew to a close, the world still reeling from 9/11, the tech industry was stuck in the doldrums. Marc Andreessen’s current company, Loudcloud, had managed to raise some money in a March IPO. But as cofounder Ben Horowitz later said, “It may have been the least celebratory IPO in history.” Then in late September, its largest competitor, Exodus, filed for bankruptcy. The situation looked almost as dire for Loudcloud, as its quarterly losses continued to widen. The LoudCloud team in 2001. In early December, Andreessen spoke at the Oracle Open World Conference. Always a web booster, even in his current incarnation as an enterprise IT executive, he talked about “a wave of applications over the next five to ten years” that will make the Internet “very central to how businesses operate." The problem was, this time nobody wanted to listen. The publication IT World Canada gave a brutal assessment: “Everyone knows the Web boom has gone bust. Everyone except Marc Andreessen, creator of Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser.” So at the end of 2001, in the midst of the dot-com crash and now with the pall of 9/11 hanging over the world too, most people had lost faith in the internet. Of course, Andreessen would have the last laugh in the years to come. Also, the bloggers of this era — fresh from redesigning their sites using Movable Type — had a feeling that the web was only just getting started.