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Revisiting the Early Net: A Slate of Predictions Made for 1995 Reveal What Has and Hasn't Changed (Jason Fry, January 8, 2007, Wall Street Journal)

Twelve years ago, some of Internet World's regular contributors got together to look back at 1994 and make predictions1 for 1995 -- a list that made the digital rounds last week.

Predictions are a dangerous business, particularly online, where they wait around to haunt you later. So how did the magazine's class of Net gurus do? [...]

And finally, there's the question of the Internet's furious growth, and how it could possibly accommodate all the "newbies" arriving with little more than their curiosity as a guide. In the fall of 1993 America Online had opened newsgroups to its users, including your columnist (then all of 24 years old). Usenet's veterans were still reeling at how to deal with the influx, and grasped that newsgroups' recent past was the Web's prelude, with graphical user interfaces making Internet use relatively easy for all.

Mr. Taylor welcomed the new wave of users from AOL and Delphi, noting graciously that "each wave of new users brings new resources for everyone." He noted the Net's ability to group people according to common interests, rather than such can't-help-its as race, class or gender, while predicting that "too much noise from too many people" would drive more people to moderated lists and newsgroups -- something he called the "return of the editors."

That's certainly proved true on the Web: Think of blogs, which are just the latest technology to help create these communities of interest (which can both empower people and leave them less exposed to other points of view) and fulfill Mr. Taylor's predictions.

Blogs tame the daunting size of the Net, offering people sources of news and discussion about a specific topic important to them, tailored lists of sites, and the conversational back and forth that made newsgroups so vibrant. It's the latter that's the real advice -- the rest isn't particularly new. What's Justin Hall's "Links From the Underground" (praised at the time by Mr. Greenberg as the "best hotlist") but a proto-blog? Today's blogs are easier to produce, but not substantially different.