TV Back in 2006, blogs had become something close to the mainstream, or at least were the primary form of social media online in various forms. This was a couple of years after they were popular enough that I'd almost received a commission to write a book about them (this was the phone call), Facebook was only just making itself open to non-students and Twitter was still yet to launch. YouTube had only been in business for eighteen months and was only just in the process of being acquired by Google.
It's at this moment Alan Yenton's Imagine arts strand decided to make a documentary to journey "into the world wide web to find out how it began, who's out there, and where it's taking us" (source) which suddenly put all kinds of what had otherwise been relatively insider elements of the web onto BBC One at half ten in the evening just after the news. It was one of the most exciting forty minutes of television I'd ever experienced.
If only I'd kept my recording of it. I know such a unicorn existed at some point because the next night, I posted this "annotation" of the programme on the blog which went through the various contributors and topics and linked to them all. At the time the title, www.herecomeseverybody.co.uk resolved to BBC One's listing page which wasn't much of a web presence so I had a bee in my bonnet about filling the gap. That URL now leads to a Go Daddy holding page. It's still owned by somebody.
Fifteen years later a lot has changed, not least that the web has become as mainstream as fuck and you simply wouldn't make this programme now. About four years later Aleks Krotoski presented The Virtual Revolution which covered the topic in greater depth (page full of clips) and now, ten years later there are weekly shows, like Krotoski's The Digital Human on Radio 4 and Click on the BBC News channel both of which retain from of the pioneering spirit.
You can see where this is heading if you've been reading this blog for long. All of these years later, do these contributors still have an online presence? Where are they now? Are many of these links still active? Is everyone on Twitter? Are they on YouTube? I'll italicise any broken links and added some commentary also in italics and margined if necessary. Is everybody still here?
PresentersToby's blogpost about the recording is archived and contains some exceedingly 00s images. His extremely broken myspace profile is here. He moved over to his own domain for a bit, but that's gone now and wasn't archive. BUT this website for a successful author has a similar domain in which case this could be his Twitter account. I've emailed him a for confirmation.
Professor Henry is now a joint professorship at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He is on Twitter.
Sputnik -- caused internet to develop because of US end of the space age
Doug Englebart -- demonstrated an online system using the world's first mouse
Enquire -- early project by Tim Berners-Lee
Ewan McDonald, author, millionth entry, Wikipedia [user page]
Arabic Wikipedia
Jordanhill Station
Wikipedia
NASA
Charlotte Bronte
Albert Einstein
DNA
Britney Spears
Christopher Wren
Tyrannosaurus
Sheffield
Blogs
As Zoe says in her blogpost, this was recorded the just as she was being outed by The Sunday Times and they day after she appeared on The Sharon Osbourne Show. 2006 was a strange time. She is on Twitter and YouTube.
Natalie is not on Twitter. She is on YouTube.
Tom Reynolds was the pen name for Brian Kellett who continued to blog until 2018. I can't find a Twitter profile for him but he has a reddit profile which updates.
Is still there!
Arctic Monkeys
Tom Flannery, Arctic Monkeys fan [unable to find web presence]
Still can't - there are a lot of Tom Flannerii in the world.
Roxana Darling, Arctic Monkeys fan [last.fm]
Ditto.
James's portfolio has moved here. He is on Twitter.
Alan Smyth, Producer, Arctic Monkeys Demo Sessions [wikipedia]
Bebo's subsequent history has been a clusterfuck. Bought by AOL two years later, it was sold to a hedgefund in 2010, bankrupt in 2013 bought back by the original founders who relaunched it several times as different things until they sold it to Amazon in 2019 who then shut it down. Now the founders have relaunched it again as an old school invite only social network without a news feed.
User generated content
David is on Twitter and YouTube, where he's now uploaded all of the Salad Fingers episodes.
RIP.
Incredibly, Second Life is still running. I wonder if the ghost of virtual Alan is still haunting the place.
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