I missed it completely, the 5 year anniversary of Baekdal.com. It started out on April 25th, 2004, in a time where the whole Web 2.0 phenonemon was just getting started. So I am getting a bit nostalgic, and I found some of the old concepts in my archives.
This is what it looked like...
The idea to start baekdal.com as a magazine did not actually come out of the blue. I started my first online magazine in 2001. It looked like this:
It was an online magazine that I started for the clothing company 'b.young'. It focused on great designs, and fashion in particular. It looked cool, but back then, nobody read magazines online. It wasn't really the big success I was hoping for.
Later I started Zociety Magazine, which was to be another fashion/design/lifestyle magazine. I hired a number of talented people, and we made a ton of content. But again, this was in 2003, and most people didn't have a laptop or broadband connections. So we just couldn't compete with the traditional media. Reading magazine online was not something people wanted to do.
In 2002 I started working on a concept for a web magazine. At first it was supposed to a magazine about how to work with the web, but that you could get from a ton of other sites on the new. So I changed it to be about understanding the web. Instead of 'how' it was supposed to be about 'why'.
(The first concept, nothing special... never really liked it.)
It was launched on April 2004 as 'Baekdal.com - The Goal is Pretty Simple'.
In early 2006, I again changed the focus to more about web as a whole. And later in the year I launched the design section. I wanted it to be about more than just the web.
(New design in February 2006.)
(New design, 3 months later, to make it look more like a magazine.)
(Design concept that never made it)
(August 2006. Completely redesigned to enhance the magazine feel, and the launch of the Design section)
And in 2008, I made a another drastic change to the site. It was now about the great experience, which is more than just about the product (and the web). It is also about people, the market etc. It is about future trends, which is a really important element. And, obviously, it also includes the design element.
This is what the site is about today. The-Great-Experience + Future Trends + Design.
In the past 5 years, I have written 669 articles (one every 2.7 days), and enough characters to fill 8,599 tweets. It has been (and still is) a really amazing project. And I owe it all to you, my readers. Thank you!
These days, everyone talks about HTML5. All the big guys like Apple, Google, and Microsoft put a lot of effort into making it happen. Google is especially focused on bringing HTML5 and web apps into the world.
Want to try out the new Digg 4 - go here http://new.digg.com (limited access - be quick)
Earlier today On2, the company behind the video codec used in the FLV video format (used by Flash), told us that they will discontinue their Flix video product line.
There is one story that keeps popping up about Wired Magazine reporting that 26% of their traffic is now coming from the iPad. A truly amazing number. But there something odd about it. I'm not seeing that anywhere else. So I did a little digging.
My use of the stream have now reached a point where I am no longer looking for news. Instead, my world is pretty much divided into two types of information. Updates that are followable, and updates that isn’t. I am now spending 99% of my time on the first group.
Foursquare Grader has compiled a list of the percentage of people who have been rewarded a badge on Foursquare. This tells us a lot about how it is being used. Most social networks have a relatively low activity rate, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
A few days ago I wrote, “Facebook is Dying, Social is Not,” and it appears that I hit a nerve. The article has so far been read by more than 25,000+ readers, in less than 3 days. It is safe to say that the complexity and privacy issues are something people really cares about.
Every now and then a short video is released that show just how much the world has changed. One of the best ones are “The Social Media Revolution” from Socialnomics. Yesterday they released an updated version, with all the latest stats.
You might have heard it already, but Google have released a new beta version of Chrome, which breaks new records in speed. And to show off how fast it really is they have made a little video.
RescueTime, a company the provides time management software, recently did a survey on what men and women spend their time one. Interesting study, but I don’t think they made the right conclusions.
Subscribe