A Short History of Now

So there must be something to it. Watch how often people interrupt each other by saying the word "So," and then launching into whatever they think is more essential than what somebody else is saying. And watch for people giving a speech start with "So—" The first speaker I heard do that was Larry Lessig, one of the world's best speakers, back in the aughts.

Bonus link, by David Weinberger, in The Cluetrain Manifesto. As Dave says, the Web was meant for writers, even though the earliest of those were high-energy physicists looking to share documents between CERN, SLAC, and the Weizmann Institute. (Paul Kunz told me that.) I started writing for the Web in the early '90s, before I could even get on it. Here is one piece I wrote in 1992, in ancient HTML, three years before I could put it on my own website. (Nobody else was publishing my stuff back then. Or, come to think of it, now.

Same goes for The Internet. And The Net. The Web is the Web, not "the web". We—the writers of the networked world—gave something up when we allowed the bishops of the AP and the Chicago Manual of Style to demote the Web from proper noun to lower-case status, down there with television and radio. Nobody invented "the television," or "the radio." Not even "the newspaper." But somebody—Sir Tim Berners-Lee—invented the World Wide Web. With upper case letters. The WWW was not the www. Is it too late to bring the Web back as a proper noun? I don't know. I do know that I'm never going to demote it in my own writing.

Here's one. Want a reason not to buy a Dodge Charger?

True for the whole band. Latest to go: WIRY/1340 in Plattsburgh, New York. Says its Facebook post, "The rise of digital platforms and social media has changed the way audiences consume content, leading to declining traditional radio listenership. Coupled with rising music royalty costs, a shrinking media sales force, and decreasing profit margins, we have reached a point where it is no longer viable to continue broadcasting."