Back in the stone age of the Internet, May of 1995, to be exact, my nephew Steven Johnson, who was working on his PhD at Columbia University, started the first on-line magazine, FEED. Steven assembled some of his friends, many of whom were college classmates from Brown and up and coming writers and journalists, raised some capital from friends and family, and built a website. This was a time when there were no HTML editors like FrontPage and Dreamweaver, which today make designing a Web site almost as easy as writing an essay in Word. No $10 a month hosting companies existed.
In addition to FEED’s professional staff of writers, FEED had a section called “Filter”. This was where anyone could express their thoughts by writing short articles on subjects that struck their fancy. Other readers could comment on these Filter posts. Often lively discussions developed.
Reviewers in major media, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Newsweek, heaped praise on this leading edge and edgy “E-zine”, a word FEED helped coin. In 1995 Newsweek ran an article on the pioneers of the then new Internet. Among those singled out was Steven Johnson along with Bill Gates and other household names.
Steven’s business model was based on ads that would be placed on FEEDs website and the revenue would pay the overhead costs, including website design, maintenance, hosting, rent, and stipends for the writers, and a return on the investors’ investment. However, advertisers were skeptical about spending anything but meager amounts on web ads. In July 2000 as the economy weakened FEED merged with another popular media website, suck.com, and became Automatic Media in order to consolidate overhead. Lycos provided an infusion of capital and for a very short while it appeared that Automatic Media coupled with yet another Johnson Concept. “Plastic”, would be the “new new” thing in the world of on-line literature. Plastic was to be a community weblog, authored by thousands of people.
In the heat of this battle for survival Steven Johnson went to San Francisco to pitch an idea to Evan Williams. Williams was working with a couple of friends on a Web-based software concept they called Blogger, which they had developed to make the expensive and complicated process of creating a weblog or “blog” easy and relatively simple. Steven wanted to connect Blogger and Plastic. His idea was to have the two connect to each other, so that interesting ideas and links would "trickle up" from the individual blogs to the group blog at Plastic.
Data on the Internet moves at the speed of light and while Evans was considering all this, the dot com meltdown was building at Internet speed. By the spring of 2001 Automatic Media was history with only a post on their website that created almost as much attention as all the articles posted over the past six years. Johnson’s farewell said, “We are feeling the effects of the recent chill. As of today, we are in suspended animation, cooled to a temperature at which our metabolic rate is near zero.” Suck said simply, “has gone fishin’.”
Remember that great line from The Graduate, “Son, the future is plastic”.
Evan Williams sold his web-based software, Blogger, to Google for pre IPO Google stock, worth – use your imagination. (You are reading this on a site developed with Blogger.)
Steven Johnson became a best selling author, (Everything Bad is Good for You, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, and Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate.) His newest book, The Ghost Map will be released in October.
Today you can find Steven Johnson writing his blog.
Monday, August 21, 2006
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2 comments:
Wow, lots of inaccuracies here... by 1995, the Internet had been around and active for over a decade at that point. The web itself was born in 1991, though it didn't really gain popularity until 1994.
And the first online magazine... in 1995? Not hardly. I was writing for several as early as 1991 and others existed well before then (many of those went on to be published on the web in 1994). And "e-zine" is a term that's been around for at least 15 years... here's a Usenet reference back in 1991.
I get what you're going for here, but there's a bunch of incorrect history here.
Ryan, thanks for your comments. You are correct about the age of the Internet. I should have said that 1995 was the very early days of the Web. I was not aware of the history of the word "e-zine". The first time I heard it I think was in the Newsweek article I referred to. I am not aware of any e-zines on the Web with professional content that predated FEED. Slate followed about 6 months after FEED was launched. Thanks for reading and commenting. I hope you enjoy Steven’s latest book The Ghost Map that I wrote about. Please post any comments you have on the book and that article. You can find a review of the book in the Washington Times.
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