At Web 2 this year we plan to have a bit of fun, not that the conference isn’t fun. But we thought we’d put a number of well known web veterans up on stage after dinner and see how much they know about our industry. This format is familiar to any of you who’ve been to D in the past or have seen early versions of the Computer History Bowl, which has been around in various incarnations for a very long time. The twist is that we’re focusing just on web history, which, until recently, was something of a oxymoron. Now that the web is more than a decade old, however, we figured it was about time we had some fun with it.
We’ll be grilling folks like Martin Nisenholtz, who has been in this industry for as long at the New York Times has had a .com (actually, longer), Steve Case, who started AOL, Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg, and Scott Kurnit, founder of About.com.
But I need your help. We’ve set up a form where you can suggest questions we should ask them. Don’t worry if you don’t know the answer, we’ll figure it out. But if you do, so much the better. Stuff like “What was on the cover of the first Industry Standard” or “How much revenue did The Globe have when it went public?”. If we use your question, I’ll thank you from stage.
It should be a fun time, and we’ll make sure to get it up on the web as soon as we can, so no matter if you can make the conference or not, you can check it out!
To be fair – you should also include GOPHER.
although, technically not the World Wide Web, it must have had an influence.
I submitted mine, though it made me put an answer. I didn’t know, so just wrote that. I still think John that it is better to make these processes transparent and interactive as we do here: http://www.askthenextpresident.com, but my guess is you will get some good ones either way.
Can you list the questions for those of us that were not there?