Agent Palmer

“The web implicity invited people to say anything–and everything.”

This is one of the most impactful lines within “Say Everything” that is stated early and often within its pages by author Scott Rosenberg.

The book may not be the end all be all of the history of blogging, but it is the most complete work on the subject to date.

It always starts with one podcast. Or it usually does. You find that one podcast either through a friend or coworker or perhaps just happenstance. You listen to that one podcast and then you subscribe and you consume all of it. Perhaps you even go through the back catalog.

That one podcast speaks to you. You get to know the host or hosts, their style of joking, their tastes, and depending on the podcast their lives. You know them, or at least you know their persona.

MoviePass is currently a $9.95 per month movie ticket subscription service started by the co-founder of Netflix. Even though I consider myself a gadget guy, I am not the guy who will pay hundreds of dollars for the first-of-a-kind product like when CD players, Blu-ray players, or the Roomba debuted.

Even though I love Apple, I have never bought a first-generation Apple product. I tend to avoid new products unless they have amazing ratings from customers I know well or I have seen them in operation. Partially, I avoid these purchases because buying them is essentially gambling.

From Netscape and the browser wars to the origins of the MP3, the rise of walled gardens such as AOL and Prodigy, the first online advertising, and e-commerce. To the iPhone and the internet in our pockets, and the creation, destruction, and aftermath of the dot com bubble; the Internet History Podcast covers it all and more.

It started back in 2014, on the 20th anniversary of the Internet Era as we know it when Netscape was founded. It made host Brian McCullough want to read a book that summed up the Internet Era. “The only problem was, no such book existed.”