The Internet Toolkit

Super-charge Your Internet Use with Seven New Services

The Internet is, as everybody knows, brilliant. Pretty much whatever you are looking for is there for the asking thanks to the power of Google. But making the most of the World Wide Web can take a little time and effort. For one thing, it changes every second and new, better resources appear every day. Keeping up with these can sometimes seem like a full time job.

Plenty of these new sites and services are very good at taking up a lot of your spare time – discovered YouTube (www.youtube.com) or StumbleUpon (www.stumbleupon.com) yet? You’ll curse us for having told you! In this feature, though, we’ve picked out seven new services and recommendations and a few more that can actually save you time and make life easier.

You may have heard or read reports of something called Web 2.0 or even the Google Operating System. It doesn’t exist just yet, and Google says it’s got no intentions in that direction, but it’s indicative of the way in which the Internet is changing. Reliance on Windows, MacOS or Linux and the programs that you’ve installed on your computer is starting to recede.

All of the services we have recommended here are free and do not – to date – mean that you will receive lots of spam email.

The High-Power Homepage

Step One

Something like 80% of internet users never change their start page, in which case it is probably MSN (www.msn.co.uk) or Apple (www.apple.com). There’s nothing much wrong with these pages, but it’s possible to get a lot more from the internet page that you view more often than any other. We recommend an immediate switch to either Excite MIX (mix.excite.co.uk) or Netvibes (www.netvibes.com). Why? Because they can be almost infinitely personalised. Changing your home page means going into the Internet Options menu (Internet Explorer) or the Edit Preferences menu (Firefox).

Step Two

Assuming you sign up for Netvibes, you end up with an almost empty page that you’re invited to name for yourself. Then click on the ‘Add Content’ button in the top left. The things that you can add fall into two categories. There are ‘widgets’ – mini programs that perform a specific purpose, like a clock or a notepad. And there are also ‘Feeds’ which allow you to tap into the content of other websites and display the latest stories right on your home page.

Step Three

Begin by adding some widgets. Some of these are displayed on the menu. Simply click on the one you want and then on the words ‘Add To My Page’. Once they are on your page you can drag these about into a position that suits you best. At this point, use the ‘sign in’ link to store your preferences. The site adds a small file called a cookie to your computer so that it will remember you next time and bring up the widgets, feeds and layout that you have selected.

Step Four

Adding feeds means that you need to know the feed address. Look for the word ‘feed’ or an orange and white icon on your favourite news and information sites and copy the address that they point to. To do this, right click on the link and choose ‘Copy Shortcut’ (Internet Explorer) or ‘Copy Link Location’ (Firefox). Return to Netvibes and choose the ‘Add Feed’ command from the Add Content menu, then paste in the address of the feed you have chosen. For example, to get the BBC Education News feed, the address would be ‘http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/education/rss.xml’.

Step Five

Before long, your new home page is likely to start looking pretty full. If you subscribe to a lot of websites and blogs, you’ll find that you only have room for five or six before you have to start scrolling down. A better solution is simply to start a new tab by clicking on the New Tab command. With multiple tabs, you can organise your page into different sections like National News, Education News, Shopping, Lists and Funny Stuff.

Personal Organiser

Step Six

Netvibes widgets give you some tools for organising your life, but there are a number of very powerful alternatives. One service you should certainly consider is Google Calendar. This is located at calendar.google.com. Why use an online calendar? Because you can access it from any computer, meaning you never have to say ‘I’m not sure, I’ll have to check and get back to you’. One quick tip once you have signed up: use the Q key to open the Quick-Add dialogue. This allows you to enter things like ‘Party at La Bodega tonight 8pm’ and they will be automatically interpreted and added. And yes, you can add your Google Calendar as a widget on your Netvibes home page.

Step Seven

The second element of a top-notch personal organiser is a really powerful To-Do list. On the web, there are plenty of alternatives, but we think that the best is Orchestrate (www.orchestratehq.com). The reasons that it’s great are that it offers a very attractive and simple interface. But this is without it being so simple that a piece of paper in your pocket would be equally useful. It also allows you to create up to six different lists. This means you can create new lists according to context (Home, Shopping, School, Phonecalls) or according to their urgency (Today, This Week, Soon).

Step Eight

The third ingredient you’re going to need is an address book. For this we would suggest one of two alternatives. The first is Plaxo (www.plaxo.com). This is available as a paid service and a free one. We have found the free service perfectly acceptable. Advantages: synchronises with Outlook and other PDAs to keep all your information synchronised. However, it does have habit of sending out lots of unwanted emails. The other alternative is to keep using Google, sign-up for a Google Mail account (mail.google.com) and put all your addresses in there. Advantages: GMail is a top-notch email client anyway and it will link with your Google calendar.

Pictures

Step Nine

Assuming you use a digital camera, then the Internet is the logical place to keep them. The internet service you choose probably has better back-up than you do; you can re-use the pictures on other websites very easily; and you can share links to the pictures with friends and family. There are lots of alternatives here, but the one we use is flickr (www.flickr.com). Flickr doesn’t just offer photo storage, but also lots of other great ways to share them such as slideshows, blog integration, tagging and more. There is also an inexpensive print service if you need to go down the dead-tree route.

Step Ten

Flickr isn’t just useful for looking after your own photos, it’s also very useful for finding photos to use for other purposes. Because people use tags and descriptions for their snaps, they are more easily searchable than other photo tools. Go to the Advanced Search page from the normal search page and check the box to search for photos with a Creative Commons licence. This allows you to use the pictures for projects of your own, providing you acknowledge the original photographer.

Applications

Step 11

When it comes to mainstream applications, word processors and spreadsheets, the web is also able to offer a useful alternative. In fact, in many respects online applications are actually more useful than the ones sitting on a desktop PC. You can access your documents from any computer, for example, and publish them as a web page or a blog post. You can also invite people to collaborate on the same document, avoiding the pain of email shuffle. For documents and spreadsheets, we recommend the Google service of the same name (docs.google.com).

Step 12

For those who want more applications, we would recommend Zoho (www.zoho.com). In addition to a word processor and a spreadsheet, there is also a presentation tool, a project management tool and an online diary. You can pay a subscription fee for the whole thing wrapped together, but otherwise the individual tools are free. Zoho also offers plug-ins for Microsoft Word and Excel to allow users to edit their online documents through the offline interface and synchronise the end results.

1) Social Media or, “How I learned to stop worrying and love communication” by Australian PRs Trevor Cook and Lee Hopkins. A good, introductory guide to Web 2.0, blogs and social media with useful tips on getting started with blogging and podcasting. It’s only 30 pages so is ideal for students and the very busy.

2) What is Social Media? by former posh UK PR and now Search Engine Marketing guru Antony Mayfield, is also an introductory guide to the subject. In Antony’s words, “The book is a romp through a definition of social media, why it is important, and some of the main iterations (blogs, wikis, podcasts, content communities and social networks) and a bonus bit on Second Life.” Also nice and short.

3) The Cluetrain Manifesto by Chris Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger. First published in 1999, this is the book that started all this engagement and ‘markets as conversations’ palaver. It’s available as a hardback on Amazon, but students and the like will appreciate that the entire text is also available online.

4) The Long Tail by Chris Anderson seemed to be everywhere over the summer. Cheats who missed the opportunity to read it then may prefer to catch up by reading this free, super-condensed, 30-page version. There’s some repetition in the real thing, to be honest, so I’d recommend that you do.

5) From Command & Control To Engage & Encourage by NY PR consultancy Envision Solutions talks about why social media matters to companies and what they can do to take advantage of the opportunities it offers. It’s based around the healthcare industry, but is equally applicable to any other sector. (author: Fard Johnmar)

6) Web 2.0 Mindmap by development guru Ed Yourdon. Not a book, of course, but a Mind Map covering all the key concepts around this phenomenon with a wealth of links to resources across the internet. It’s updated fairly frequently so keep checking back for the latest version. I’m not really a mindmaps person, but I still find it very useful.

7) Blogs and Community by Seattle-based e-facilitation and e-community specialist Nancy White is a slightly more academic look at the phenomenon of blogs and social networks and the different kinds of communication models that they entail. That might sound a little scary, but it isn’t. And there’s a handy podcast of the paper available here.

We Media by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis (website here) is, as you might expect, about citizen journalism. In the authors’ words, “Historically, journalists have been charged with informing the democracy. But their future will depend not on only how well they inform but how well they encourage and enable conversations with citizens. That is the challenge.”

9) We-think by Charles Leadbetter is about “what the rise of the likes of Wikipedia and Youtube, Linux and Craigslist means for the way we organise ourselves, not just in digital businesses but in schools and hospitals, cities and mainstream corporations”. Published online, the idea is that readers’ comments become an integral part of the whole work.

10) New Influencers by Paul Gillin is to be published in dead-tree format next year. In the meantime, the author offers drafts of the whole thing in both HTML and MS Word format. It’s about the rise of blogs and blogging, what it means for businesses and how they can best engage with this new environment.

Any others you are aware of?

11) Thanks, Antony, for a reminder about Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler. The introduction says “Production is shifting from physical products like blue jeans, to decentralized information goods, like articles on the Internet. This gives users more power (they can publish instead of just reading), creates more opportunities for democratic participation, lowers costs for developing countries, and democratizes the creation of our culture.” It should keep you busy a while longer once you’ve finished the others…

12) Since I have allowed one academic paper, I shouldn’t miss the collection of Papers and Talks published by Danah Boyd. The talk about G/localisation is especially recommended.

13) Thanks, Ed, for the good word about Knock, Knock by Seth Godin. Not social media or Web 2.0 as such. It’s about creating websites that actually work, so probably all of us want to read this one, whatever your interests. And also Who’s There?, a follow-up I haven’t read yet, but which Ed reckons is more Web 2.0ish. Two more: Everyone’s An Expert (about Squidoo) and Flipping the Funnel.

On the one hand, there are dozens of other video sharing sites. There’s Google video, Yahoo video, AOL video, Veoh, ClipShack, Videobomb and (probably) a hundred others - sorry, too exhausting to provide links. Everyone wants a piece of the action. This may not make things as difficult for YouTube as it might appear, though. While some of their competitors are big companies, they don’t have user share or “social capital”. YouTube is the clear market leader and this brings with it a considerable competitive advantage. It’s a virtuous circle. The majority of users go to YouTube, so they attract the largest number of fresh contributions, the lifeblood of any such system. Aspiring film makers will gravitate towards the networks that give them the largest amount of recognition. Being the biggest is likely to mean that you have the best material, as well as the worst, but the systems YouTube have in place (favourites, votes and groups) make it easy to find the most entertaining and popular clips. Where it does make things hard is in the costs - Google and Yahoo (and probably AOL, no confirmation?) have their own server farms. YouTube doesn’t.

So that introduces the second issue, which is making money. The cost of delivering 100mn videos a day remains unknown, but will clearly be substantial. In April 2006, Forbes estimated their costs at $1mn per month. They had around 50% of the traffic they have now at that point. The company has received funding from Sequoia Capital, which invested $3.5 million in November 2005, and another $8mn in May 2006. There may be other investors we don’t know about. At the same time, though, YouTube does not currently charge users for any part of its service, and it’s hard to see how they could. If they introduced a charge for uploading or watching videos, contributors would migrate to free services quickly. Uploading to YouTube is essentially anonymous and unmonitored; the volume of media being added to the service makes this impractical. Thus, it would be almost impossible to distinguish business uploaders from amateur film makers and therefore charge only those people using the service for marketing purposes. Currently, the main sources of revenue are advertising and special deals like the one they have struck with NBC. As with social networks, getting advertisers to risk their brands being tarnished by appearing alongside content that they have no control over is difficult. Jupiter Research analyst David Card is sceptical about the company’s chances: “There will be some advertisers who won’t mind sponsoring lots of crappy content cause they want to get in front the kids who go to these sites. But there are lots of advertisers who don’t want anything do with it…One thing I can guarantee you is there’s not enough advertising dollars to go around.”

The tide may be turning, however. The company was able to secure a deal to promote Pirates of the Caribbean 2. Creating protected areas, such as interstitials or monitored channels, in the same way that MySpace has created a comedy page free of user-generated content, may be one way the company could attract brand advertisers. In any case, the anxiety about consumer media sites is certain to lessen over time. Update: the company has now has started showing rich media banner ads from networks including AOL’s Advertising.com.

The third possible threat to YouTube’s dominance are the users themselves. Like Wikipedia and digg, contributors to the service do not receive any payment for their efforts. For professional marketeers, this is not a concern, of course. However, for amateur film-makers, the rewards may seem slim. There are some big success stories. Comedian Judson Laipply’s Evolution of Dance clip on YouTube has led to television appearances. A failed television pilot episode, Nobody’s Watching, was aired on the service and achieved such popularity that NBC decided to put the programme back into development. However, the number of amateur film-makers plucked from obscurity and shot into stardom remains disappointingly small.

For this reason, it’s understandable why some of the more popular film makers on YouTube have moved over to rival service Revver. Revver pays film-makers a 50% share of their advertising revenue every time their video is played on the site. Cult web video producers Ze Frank and Ask-A-Ninja, each of whom have audiences of around 10,000 per episode, have moved their content onto Revver, which carries regular advertising from Microsoft, Universal Pictures, Warner Brothers, and American Apparel. The clearest success story, though, is that of Steven Voltz and Fritz Grobe whose clip Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiment had reputedly earned them $30,000 from their advertising share. Viewed more than 6mn times between its release on May 31 2006 and August 9th, the video features an elaborate Las Vegas Bellagio casino fountain created by dropping the mints into cola. However, the pair estimate that they have lost $30,000 through unauthorised uploads to services like YouTube and Google Video, where the advertising is unaccounted for.

YouTube is perhaps one of the sharpest examples of the challenges facing Web 2.0 startups. They are cheap to produce in many respects. The content comes from users, not journalists or film-makers. They don’t need to spend any money on marketing, since once again, the users are doing that for them. Once launched, the research and development costs are minimal. However, the pressure to make money quickly is also harder - the company is said to use up more than 100TB of bandwidth every day - and the difficulties in attracting advertising and sponsorship from mainstream brands are as hard as any other site hosting consumer media. At the same time, competitors mimicking their service from established brands and companies like Revver, who offer an incentive for users to move, makes their position unstable. Like many Web 2.0 businesses, YouTube is in a race against time. Can they overcome the resistance of potential advertisers and sponsors wary about risking their brands in a decentralised, user-edited environment before the capital runs out?

On the philosophy of the site, founder Jimmy Wales quotes the fraudulent quiz winner who became an editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Charles Van Doren, who said: “Because the world is radically new, the ideal encyclopedia should be radical, too … It should stop being safe — in politics, in philosophy, in science.” The project depends on offering its users more trust than any traditional website would allow. Long-serving Wikipedian Angela Beesley says, “Wikipedia exists to provide a globally available, free (as in freedom, as well as money), encyclopedic (verifiable and unbiased) resource to everyone in their own language. I subscribe to this goal and I also enjoy working with people who share it with me.”

It started in 2001 as an adjunct to Wales’ previous project, an expert-written encyclopaedia, Nupedia. Nupedia had stumbled at the first hurdle and only amounted to 21 articles after a year’s work. Then Wales and his editor Larry Sanger heard about wikis. Wikis are online content management systems designed to allow collaboration. They put together a wiki site and told the Nupedia mailing list about it. Wales hoped that the new site might allow him to gather a few articles for the Nupedia, but it quickly overtook the expert reference. After one month of opening the new site to user contributions, it had 600 articles. After one year, there were 20,000. In June 2006, it had more than 4,300,000 user-written articles in over 200 languages, including more than 1,200,000 in the English-language version. Plans to produce a paper version of the German-language edition of the Wikipedia, which has a ‘mere’ 417,000 articles, are estimated to involve 100 volumes of 800 pages. By comparison, the print version of the most comprehensive edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica comprises just 26 volumes. According to Nielsen Netratings, Wikipedia is the seventh most popular news and information site in the world, way ahead of any other encyclopaedia or printed newspaper site. In June 2006, tracking site Alexa (www.alexa.com), said Wikipedia was the sixteenth most visited site on the web among its users.

Running an encyclopedia “anyone can edit” is prone to difficulties. The person contributing an article and the people editing it may not be experts in a particular subject. They may not be very good writers. They may, indeed, be malicious and aim to contribute libellous information or deface existing articles through their editing. In November 2004, former Encyclopedia Britannica editor Robert McHenry led the charge in an article entitled, ‘The Faith-Based Encyclopedia’. Observing a number of inaccuracies and internal inconsistencies in an article about Alexander Hamilton, McHenry attacked the ability of Wikipedians to maintain quality without qualified experts, peer review or guiding editorial principles. And, in any case, he noted, inaccuracies aside:

…the article is what might be expected of a high school student, and at that it would be a C paper at best. Yet this article has been “edited” over 150 times. Some of those edits consisted of vandalism, and others were cleanups afterward. But how many Wikipedian editors have read that article and not noticed what I saw on a cursory scan? How long does it take for an article to evolve into a “polished, presentable masterpiece,” or even just into a usable workaday encyclopedia article?

In a further article, McHenry disputes the notion of the combining an encyclopedia with any kind of ‘wisdom of crowds model’:

One simple fact that must be accepted as the basis for any intellectual work is that truth – whatever definition of that word you may subscribe to – is not democratically determined. And another is that talent, whether for soccer or for exposition, is not equally distributed across the population…

The criticisms started to get worse. John Seigenthaler was extremely distressed to learn that, “John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960’s. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven.” He’d never heard such allegations before and was extremely distressed to hear about them, publishing the story of his attempts to track down his traducer in USA Today. Other criticisms of the poor quality of the writing in the Wikipedia and factual inaccuracies found in some entries made by Nick Carr, the author of Does IT Matter, led Jimmy Wales to note on the community message board:

…the two examples he puts forward are, quite frankly, a horrific embarrassment. [[Bill Gates]] and [[Jane Fonda]] are nearly unreadable crap.

Why? What can we do about it?

The site introduced a greater level of editorial control, locking some subjects from editing by any but well-established contributors. It has also instituted greater controls on the quality of edits and contributions. But the encyclopedia was to receive a robust defence from unusual quarters. In December 2005, UK scientific journal Nature published the results of a test of the accuracy of Wikipedia. They randomly chose articles on scientific topics, along with their corresponding entries in the Britannica. These were sent for review to acknowledged experts in the fields chosen: “The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.” The subheading for the ensuing article championed the online reference, saying, “Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries”. Subsequent reports about the study either hailed the Wikipedia as being just as good as its print ancestor, or criticised the methodology of the research and Nature’s conclusions. The Encyclopedia Britannica certainly believes that the study’s methods and conclusions are incorrect. The debate still rages.

In some respects, though, the level of accuracy currently attained by Wikipedia is irrelevant. Its user figures show that it is good enough for most people to trust its results. Certainly good enough for many people to avoid paying a subscription fee to expert-edited encyclopedia sites. And the alleged lack of accuracy in the Wikipedia is something that is being continuously worked on. To choose a random example, the article about Sir Isaac Newton was edited more than 50 times in June 2006 alone. Maybe that fact seems worrying – more than 50 shortcomings in a single article spotted in a single month – but others may see it as reassuring. More than 50 people a month are combing through this article and refining and perfecting and adding to it. The speed at which Wikipedia can be updated may be a weakness in some ways, but it is also certainly a strength, says Wales: “There is a small scandal going on in Germany. One of the questions on the German version of ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ was wrong. The show had referenced an answer on the German version of Britannica, which was wrong. It was wrong on Wikipedia as well, but we were able to update it immediately.”

If you will forgive the broad statement, the Wikipedia is already the largest single source of knowledge ever created, discounting aggregate sources such as libraries. Yet at the same time, nobody has been paid to write articles for the service. The authors and ad-hoc editors of articles do this without acknowledgement – only a user name on the history page of the article identifies the author, and hundreds of people may have changed that author’s content since it was written. There isn’t even any advertising on Wikipedia – it is paid for by user donations.

The Wikipedia is clearly a very special and unusual project and quite different to the average Web 2.0 startup. However, the point about what people are doing with the web remains. People are very clearly prepared to combine their knowledge and work at making the web a better place for themselves and others. Going through the Isaac Newton article for the 1000^th time to check the facts and add a little extra is quite serious work; work for which there is no reward except the personal satisfaction derived from having contributed. The people who contribute to Wikipedia – and the hundreds of other user-led sites available – are clearly not “surfing” the web. They are making it.

Update: The Atlantic Review has an even longer and more comprehensive article outside of their paywall here.

Current levels of interest in e-business are at a five-year high. There is a lot of interest in starting a business on the internet; in investing in other people’s internet businesses; and in diverting advertising money from print and broadcast campaigns to online. This marks the recovery of the medium from a ‘trough of disillusionment’, to use research company Gartner’s biblical description .

In the mid-to-late nineties, the internet was widely tipped as the next big thing. The ownership of internet access had finally moved into the mainstream and was no longer the preserve of geeks with Computer Science degrees. It was starting to become clear to businesses that having an internet presence could give them affordable, worldwide access to customers like no other available media. Increasing capability to perform secure two-way communications over the web led to the possibility of carrying out business transactions over the internet and the birth of e-commerce. People started to talk about ‘dotcoms’, businesses that conduct a major part of their commercial activity online. Such businesses would be lightweight, global and operate 24/7. It was a fantastic idea and it’s easy to see why people thought that the internet would provide a certain route to financial success. Unfortunately, this led to greed and to an inability to distinguish between a good business plan for an internet business and a terrible one. Tony Davis of Red-gate software sums it up nicely: “There was too much money being thrown at too many silly ideas. People got all caught up in an ‘everything’s different now’ whirlwind and forgot that the old, boring economic rules still applied.”

Netscape, whose main product was a popular web browser, is described by Tim O’Reilly as the “standard bearer of Web 1.0″ . Their launch on Wall Street was one of the first of many staggering offerings over the period. Initially, the stock price at IPO was to be $12. After all, the company had less than $25mn in annual sales at that point, and though their usage rates were growing very strongly, it was in debt. However, the buzz around a major internet IPO was so loud that on August 9 1995, Netscape Communications Inc. went public with stock valued at $28 a share. At that point, the typical asking price for a technology IPO was around $15. This doubling in price did not seem to inhibit investors at all, though. In actual fact, it didn’t even open at this value, but at $71, such was the level of interest. The value rose to $75 and closed at $58 at the end of the day, giving the company a first-day cap of $2.7bn. Jim Clark, co-founder of the company with a 20% stake, suddenly had half a billion dollars of stock.

Confidence that Netscape was the key to the next big thing continued to grow. On November 28th, the share price leapt again, gaining 20 points in a day, to $131. At the time, industry analyst Michael Levine commented: “Everyone wants to be connected with Netscape. There’s a growing realization that it is the standard.”

Company PR Chris Holten recalls some of the excitement around the offering, which spread way beyond traditional investors :

Caller: I’m a very sophisticated investor who has a very substantial amount of money to invest in Netscape stock and I want to talk to someone to find out how I can get it cheap.
Finance: Have you spoken yet to our underwriters?
Caller: What’s an underwriter?
Finance: Well, basically Netscape sells the shares of stock to an underwriter, in this case it’s Morgan Stanley and also Hambrecht & Quist (interruption…)
Caller: Was that Hamburger Kissed?
Finance: No, H-A-M-B-R-E-C-H-T & Q-U-I-S-T
Caller: Now what are you calling them?
Finance: The underwriter. So we sell the shares to Morgan Stanley and they sell the shares to the public.
Caller: Could I talk to Mr. Stanley please?

Such stories are funny, but they are also very typical of a time when ordinary members of the public started to feel as though stocks and shares could make them money. Throughout the eighties, in the UK, privatisations of public companies were made more palatable by the Conservative government by marketing these offerings to the population as opportunities to cash-in. The ‘Tell Sid’ TV and press campaign around the sell off of British Gas in 1986 was perhaps the peak of this, likening the share offering to a horse-racing tip. Since these shares were offered well below their value, many made considerable profits over the period.

When we talk about the huge amounts of money raised, spent and frittered away during the dotcom boom, it’s worth remembering that we are not just talking about the people we’d want to lose money - ‘vulture capitalists’ and grey-haired zillionaires who don’t understand the internet but want a piece of the pie. We’re also talking about life-savings, penny stocks and pension funds. Back in California, meanwhile, as David Vise records in his history of Google, “The Netscape IPO symbolized the ushering in of the Internet era in Silicon Valley and created a gold-rush mentality” .

On April 12th 1996, the same thing happened again at the Yahoo! NASDAQ IPO. The stock shot up from $13 when the market opened to $43 an hour later, which equated to $1 billion for the company. Ten minutes after this, the stock dropped $10 to around $33, where it stayed for the rest of the day. In total, 8.5 million shares were traded in its first day. At that time, Yahoo! was not even remotely profitable, reporting a loss of $643,000 despite sales of $1.4 million during its first ten months. The company’s strategy was to use its own IPO to build its brand to the extent that it would drive them into profitability - a strategy that proved very successful. Since Yahoo! was already a well-known brand in the internet search market, the offering amplified this, considerably outperforming the IPOs of lesser known competitors Excite and Lycos the previous week.

The enormous fortunes being made through the stock market on internet tools and web sites were clearly of enormous interest to Venture Capitalists and other investors. Yet, they knew that these valuations were hit-and-miss. Investing in a single internet company was as likely to ruin you as make your fortune. So they spread their risk by investing in many internet companies, choosing a mixture of long-shot outsiders and what they thought were a sure thing. The company managers in these startups were typically very young.

Some of the best known ‘Siliconaires’ bear a startling resemblance. Jerry Yang and David Filo were on the Stanford University doctoral programme when they left to start Yahoo! in 1995. So was Jeff Bezos before he started Amazon in 1994. So were Larry Page and Sergei Brin before starting Google in 1998. In some respects, this was inevitable; you needed access to computers and time to research your product to come up with a successful dotcom. You also needed training and confidence with using computers, not to mention a lot of optimism about the business prospects of a company that didn’t have any physical products and operated over the web. And you needed to be in an atmosphere - like Silicon Valley - where people would take your ideas seriously and where the Sand Hill road Venture Capital companies like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital would potentially back your ideas. Many operated at a loss since they needed to build their brand and presence before customers would come. Some operated at a loss because their business model was fundamentally flawed. Their need for investment was tied to marketing themselves or tiding the owners over until internet surfers found them and converted their dreams and aspirations into gold.

This youthfulness led to the popular image of dotcoms being led by young men in polo shirts and jeans, handing out free soft drinks and sweets to their employees. They worked in ’spaces’ rather than offices and installed table football (’foosball’) in the board room. A lot were inexperience as managers. It was their first full-time job, and they’d become the CEOs of companies after a training in computer engineering rather than business. Many dotcoms were like this, though at least an equal number were very serious, very organised and extremely charismatic. Dotcoms also had a reputation for working long hours and demanding exceptional performance from their staff. Nonetheless, there were also a lot of companies who appeared to accept a lot of investment and were burning through it very quickly without getting any closer to the hoards of internet riches their investors so coveted.

The boom rose to a peak as the century drew to a close. In the UK, the First Tuesday club was formed in October 1998 by Julie Meyer to provide a networking opportunity for dotcom entrepreneurs and other interested parties, such as greedy VCs who sniffed the chance at a fortune. The club’s website had 500,000 registered members by 2000. In February 1999, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, with a personal fortune estimated at $10.1bn, reached number 19 on Forbes’ global rich list and in September of the same year, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair warned businesses: “If you’re not exploiting the opportunities of e-commerce, you could go bankrupt.” There were 457 IPOs in 1999, most of them dotcoms, and in the case of 117 of these, stocks doubled in price on the first day of trading.

The new century saw record figures on international stock markets. On December 31 1999, the FTSE 100 peaked at 6,930.20. By January 14, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had hit an all-time closing high of 11,722.98.

January 30th marked the zenith of the dotcom boom. Sixteen dotcoms including pets.com (an online petfood store) and epidemic.com (an online marketing agency) spent up to $3mn each on 30-second advertising slots during the US Super Bowl XXXIV. As the Guardian reported on March 10th 2005, “In the US, the internet was everywhere. News magazines from the stalwart Time through to the internet cheerleaders Wired, Red Herring and the Industry Standard proclaimed the birth of the new economy. Wall Street analysts Henry Blodget, at Merrill Lynch, and Mary Meeker, from Morgan Stanley, were feted as royalty.”

The UK was late to the dotcom party in many respects, but had the dubious honour of spawning the last great dotcom IPO. The online travel agency and ticket company lastminute.com, run by Martha Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman, was simultaneously launched on both the NASDAQ and London Stock Exchange on March 14 2000. The company wasn’t making a profit, but this was an internet property, so that didn’t matter. The owners were expecting to make a staggering £500mn out of the flotation. True to form, it exceeded their expectations enormously - the shares gained 28% in a single day, giving the company a first-day valuation of £800mn.

And this was roughly the point at which everything started to go wrong. Three days after the lastminute.com flotation, Dutch ISP World Online had its IPO and raised $7.2bn. A week later, it was discovered that its founder, Nina Brink, had sold 1.2mn of her shares considerably below the offer price the day after its flotation. In May, fashion retailer Boo.com collapsed having burned through $135mn of investor’s money. “Mainly on a pretty website from which no-one bought anything,” says Steve Mulder of Molecular.

The following month, Psion, Baltimore Technologies, Kingston Communications and Thus, having been inducted into the FTSE 100 three months earlier, were ejected from the list. Super Bowl advertiser epidemic.com went bust, laying off 60 people after spending the $7.6mn they had raised in first-round financing. Toytime and Toysmart went to the wall, as did CraftShop.com and violet.com. In November, pets.com became the first listed US dotcom to collapse. Pets.com, another Super Bowl advertiser, had raised $82.5mn at their IPO only nine months earlier. The expressions “dot bomb” and “dot compost” started to gain currency.

Things went from bad to worse in 2001. Kosmo.com - free delivery of fast food and snacks - went bust despite $280mn of funding. Grocery delivery service Webvan.com went under, having raised $375mn at their IPO a mere 18 months earlier. In April alone, 17,554 people lost their jobs from dotcom startups; 64 dotcom companies closed the following month. In contrast to 1999, there were 76 IPOs in 2001, none of which doubled in price on the first day. On September 21, the tech-heavy NASDAQ index hit 1,423.19, having lost 70% of its value since the previous March. The party was over. Stewart Kirkpatrick, writing in the Scotsman in January 2002, noted, “You don’t need the right kind of eyes to see where the dotcom wave crashed. The tidemark is there for all to see in the second-hand office furniture warehouses of California. In their soulless aisles, you can browse among the personal effects of the dotcom casualties: teak boardroom tables; fine, leather, executives’ chairs; pool tables; and all the other trappings of e-excess.”

The final irony came the following January when Amazon announced its first quarter in profit. By that time, Jeff Bezos’ fortune was down to $1.5bn, number 293 on the rich list. Amazon, e-bay and Yahoo!, the most prominent survivors of the dotcom boom, have gone on to become the giants among internet businesses. But they would never again receive valuations quite so wildly removed from their profits.