As for the stuff that didn’t fit neatly into a category, members of our nominating committee mentioned these technologies and people among their personal “7 Wonders of the Internet.”
Paul Hoffman: Firefox — It found a way to fund itself (see Google), and it showed that freeware could be more usable than entrenched commercial software. … Free Wi-Fi in coffee shops and Laundromats — It is truly amazing that this is possible without onerous registration or payments.
Phil Daley: Foreign language translation pages so that you can read (somewhat) a foreign language Web site.
Liam Noonan: Dave Winer – 10 years of blogging and still going strong. … Bernie Goldbach – Former USAF pilot now technology guru living in Tipperary in Ireland and teaching students how to read and publish to the Internet using only a mobile phone, podcasts (www.podcasting.ie), blogging (irish.typepad.com) and flickr.
Jim Albright: Streaming content has changed the way in which news and entertainment can be delivered via the Internet. News sites are no longer restricted to static text and still photos. Audio and video clips of events can be delivered worldwide, on demand. Listeners around the globe are no longer restricted to their local market, but can tune in virtually any radio station on the planet. This is shortwave to the nth degree.
Fiber Optics – As a network engineer, I felt compelled to include at least one hardware technology that revolutionized the Internet. Communications technologies have to a large extent been evolutionary, not revolutionary. But the order of magnitude by which fiber optic technology has increased bandwidth over older technologies is largely responsible for much of what we take for granted today.
Jack Miller: Open source – I don’t know how you would characterize this but because of the Internet, Open Source has flourished. Without the net it surely wouldn’t have and we would not have Linux, Firefox or any free spyware products. The Internet has provided free software services for millions.
John Gog: Usenet – Yes, I know it’s a heap of rubble, decaying away, but thanks to the Usenet, a lot of newbies were able to get connected in the first place. The Usenet was where you could find out how to configure Linux, fix your BSOD, and find great recipes for Chicken-fried Steak. On-line forums and news aggregators all owe their lineage to the Usenet.
Bill Davies: Bulletin Boards — Back in the days of 300 BAUD modems, monochrome monitors and dial-up access, I signed up for a bulletin board and discovered the most amazing thing. There were thousands, maybe millions of people that I could talk to about almost anything. People I could help and who could help me with almost any problem. Bulletin boards were a means of communication that had never in human history existed before and should be considered as the ancestor of all the newsgroups, and social networks that are now so ubiquitous.
Bob Brown: P2P: Revolutionizing everything from music to telephony to TV (via Joost, Skype etc).
(Back to “7 Wonders” introduction.)
