Archive for the 'Philly Internet History Week' Category

The Philebrity Index: For Sale

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

Number of former Masterpiece Theatre hosts whose bodies were sold for parts by Louis and Gerald Garzone: 1
Cost on StubHub today of a President’s Club Suite for the Eagles’ opener against the Rams on Sunday: $20,589

Minimum amount that Sweeney could get for his iPhone if he could only get the damn thing unlocked: about $500
Yesterday’s [...]

Philly Internet History Week Overtime: CDNow It Can Be Told

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

AS TOLD BY GEHRETT ELLIS: I was hired as a product manager in October 1999. After spending years working for Internet research and development firms in Washington DC and small online agencies in South Jersey and Conshohocken, CDNOW was a breath of fresh air. I was surrounded by talented and creative people who loved their [...]

Outro: Alex Hillman On The Ghost Of Philly’s Internet Future

Friday, August 29th, 2008

EDITOR’S NOTE: Well, that about wraps it up for the first-ever Philly Internet History Week, and we can’t help but get the feeling that we’ve only scratched the surface. Thanks to everyone who wrote in, and please, keep ‘em coming! Even as regular posting resumes after the holiday weekend, please feel free to send in [...]

I Love You, You Big Dummy: A Brief History Of Dummytown, Philly’s Most Infamous Bitch List

Friday, August 29th, 2008

AS TOLD BY COLLIN KEEFE: It all started for me one night back in the Fall of 1999 at Juke, Jerk and Jive, the dearly departed Wednesday party at Bob and Barbara’s where DJ Oz and Chef Jeff Simmers rocked soul music while serving up lip-smacking soul food. I had just moved back to Philly [...]

WTF? Do You Mean To Tell Me That Philly Internet History Week Is Almost Over, And NO ONE Has Sent In The Definitive CDNow Post?

Friday, August 29th, 2008

Didn’t most of you used to work there?

MP3’s Please: PlotTwist Was Ahead Of Its Time, 4-Track In Hand

Friday, August 29th, 2008

AS TOLD BY ED HOGARTY, CO-FOUNDER: Mike Kennedy and I had put Plot Twist records together to release our own band’s 7″ (Mesmer). We were interested in putting out stuff from other Philadelphia bands, but didn’t have the money or resources to do so. The mp3 collective seemed like a good way to keep the [...]

Fear, Loathing And Anal Sex… On A Dial-Up: The Other Side Of CPCN’s First Philly Internet Community

Friday, August 29th, 2008

AS TOLD BY JEN OLIVER, CPCN USER FROM 1995-1996: I remember CPCN a little differently: While it carried the City Paper name, the telnet site seemed disconnected from the paper entirely. A bunch of people, though, remember it as one of the first Philly-based online communities.
I wasted many hours (and a shitload of money [...]

Tales From The Boom: That One About The Streaming Audio Gentrifiers

Friday, August 29th, 2008

AS TOLD BY SARA GALLO, ARTIST & MUSICIAN: “Streaming Audio”
 
I’d first heard of this phenomenon right after moving into a loft space in Northern Liberties.  It was a crumbling quasi-squat, complete with roof leaks, sagging floors, etc.  I lived there along with 3 other people; most of us were UArts grads.  None of us had much money, and the [...]

PhillyFuture.org: Aggregating The Aggregators Since 1999

Friday, August 29th, 2008

AS TOLD BY KARL MARTINO, FOUNDER: Philly Future was one of the first regionally focused blogs that tried to share what people were talking about online, while trying to highlight the best, most interesting bloggers out of the Philly area. And it’s done as a labor of love for the city.
We launched way back in [...]

City Paper: Pretty Much Invented The Internet In Philly, But Sadly, Somehow Got Stuck With The Dot-Net

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

AS TOLD BY HOWARD ALTMAN, FORMER EDITOR, CITY PAPER: Back around the time that Al Gore invented the Internet, a chest-hair-twirling pre-cog named Bruce Schimmel divined the future.
“One day, son, all this will be yours,” he would say.
He wasn’t talking about the curtains.
Rather, he was talking about what was behind the curtains, in this case, [...]

NorthernLiberties.org: I Am The God Of All Neighborhood Message Boards, All Who Come After Shall Bow Before Me

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

AS TOLD BY JOHN MYERS, FOUNDER & EDITOR, NORTHERNLIBERTIES.ORG:While newspapers have been busy cutting staff and fumbling with embracing the Internet NorthernLiberties.org has morphed into a Wikipediaesque outlet for community news, gossip, rants & raves that traditional media are not covering effectively.
I have a love / hate relationship with NorthernLiberties.org. The site attracts its [...]

GrooveLingo: Philly’s Premiere Local Music Proto-Blog

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

AS TOLD BY TRISHY GDOWIK: It was 1996, and I was living at my parents’ house in the suburbs, working as a lowly administrative assistant for a jewelry magazine. I was trying to save enough money to put a deposit on an apartment and rejoin civilization - e.g. move to the city. At least [...]

Great Moments In Philadelphia Internet Lawyerin’: The COPA Litigation

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

AS TOLD BY CONOR CORCORAN:As often bemused and bemoaned on this website, Philadelphia is a city of colossal contradiction and irony.
Our beloved metropolis, now an epicenter of the avant-garde in many aspects, is a parallel universe compared to the Philadelphia of the 1970s and 1980s. Our ne’er-do-well neighborhoods, once domains of deviance, [...]

BewitchedBy: They Were Here Before Etsy And Jezebel, And They’ll Be Here After, Dammit!

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

AS TOLD BY KRISTY OSLYN: Back when NoLibs was still Northern Liberties. Before your mom talked about Flickr and Facebook. We got to thinkin’ we could do a site about some of our favorite things. A site about a dress we found that we loved, stationery made for the post, a new [...]

Philly Makes, The World Takes: Ladies And Gentlemen, The Trackstar Singles Ads

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

Back in the day — you know, before everyone got hooked on heroin at that one Spiritualized show and “screamo” was having its humble beginnings in the garages and VFWs of Doylestown and South Jersey — a young running enthusiast named Bryan Poerner started up a humble little DIY label called Trackstar Records. Trackstar [...]

And Now, The Only Thing Comcast Ever Contributed To The Internet: “The Fan”

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

Your mom still gets all her Internet video this way. Hahaha. Moms! I know!

Dept. Of Ye (Not Very) Olde Webjunk: HillaryIsMomJeans Gave The World A Little Bit Of The Ol’ Philly Charm

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

AS TOLD BY BEN KESSLER: When Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle was growing in popularity, myself and a friend, Jeff Vogel, thought to ourselves “Man wouldn’t it be funny to do the same thing with Hillary but in a negative connotation?” Thus, Hillary Is Mom Jeans was born! We added a little twist that [...]

Prep Net Kicked It Old School In 1988 Like A Young Matthew Broderick

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

AS TOLD BY ANDY SMITH:No discussion of Philadelphia Internet history can be complete without mentioning PREPnet, the original ISP in Pennsylvania. To us grizzled network engineers, PREPnet _was_ the Internet. If you wanted a blazing fast 56 Kb/s leased line to the ‘net, it came from PREPnet. T1 was for those who [...]

Personal History: I Used To Love Her (The Radio, That Is), But I Had To Kill Her (With The Internet)

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

AS TOLD BY MEL “TOXIC” TAYLOR: In the 80’s and 90’s, I was a Philly Radio DJ at stations like WYSP, WDRE, WPST, WKDU, and WIFI. As a native Philadelphian, being on the air here was a dream come true. Working on the same team as Stern & Debella at WYSP, or being a [...]

Tales From The Boom: Digital City Philadelphia

Monday, August 25th, 2008

AS TOLD BY PIERS MARCHANT: By 1999, shit had gotten figured out, at least to some degree, with respect to the Internet. The big players had emerged — Yahoo, Amazon, and, naturally, the service pipe-line for millions and millions of country bumpkins who were too afraid to dip more than their toes into the icy [...]