Jess Barron, a coworker in 1999 at Wild, Wild Web (and a high school classmate of Michael’s — it’s a small, random world!), sent me an email this morning about Yahoo’s 10th Anniversary. She’s part of the team at Yahoo! who put together a “netrospective” of their first decade on the web called “10 Years, 100 Moments of the Web.” Yahoo! is giving away free ice cream today at Baskin Robbin’s around the U.S.
Jess also wrote on her website (no permalink for the entry, alas) about her own 10-year anniversary working and writing on the web.
The past 10 years working on the web have kept me experiencing a continuous deja vu. Anyone who has been a web writer, editor or producer since 1995 or 1996 certainly must feel somewhat akin to Bill Murray’s character in the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day.” For instance, when reading this Christian Science monitor article about Yahoo!’s new media plans in Santa Monica last week, I was struck by the initial thrill about these exciting plans and these exciting times, but a few moments later I had a strong sense of deja vu. Hadn’t I already lived in this exciting time? Hadn’t I already heard *these* exciting plans? Ah yes, I had. Reading this article brought me back to the spring of 2000, when I worked at Scour.com in Beverly Hills and we had partners like AtomFilms and iFilm and Stephen Spielberg’s Dreamworks-backed pop.com was set to launch with an offering of Internet-only programming. This time (five years later) we have seen that the world (well, the U.S. at least) is finally ready for consuming entertainment content on their computers. This time, I am convinced that this stuff can actually be successful. My conviction is so strong that I am leaving San Francisco to move down to Los Angeles again to give it another try.
