continue from we,the media by Dan Gilmor

Personal technology wasn’t just about going online. It was about the creation of media in new and, crucially, less expen­sive ways. For example, musicians were early beneficiaries of computer technology.12 But it was desktop publishing where the potential for journalism became clearest.

maybe you interested, this is the rise of new media in 90s, digital era

As the 1990s arrived, personal computers were becoming far more ubiquitous. Relatively few people were online, except per­haps on corporate networks connecting office PCs; college cam­puses; bulletin boards; or still-early, pre-web commercial ser­vices such as CompuServe and America Online. But another series of breakthroughs was about to move us into a networked world.

In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee created the hypertext technology that became the World Wide Web. He wrote software to serve, or dish out, information from connected computers, and a “client” program that was, in effect, the first browser. He also sparked the development of Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, which allowed anyone with a modest amount of knowl­edge to publish documents as web pages that could be easily linked to other pages anywhere in the world. Why was this so vital? We could now move from one site and document to another with the click of a mouse or keyboard stroke. Berners-Lee had connected the global collection of documents the Net had already created, but he wanted to take the notion a step fur­ther: to write onto this web, not just read from it.

But there’s something Berners-Lee purposely didn’t do. He didn’t patent his invention. Instead, he gave the world an open and extensible foundation on which new innovation could be built.

What had happened? Communications had completed a transformation. The printing press and broadcasting are a one-to-many medium. The telephone is one-to-one. Now we had a medium that was anything we wanted it to be: one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many. Just about anyone could own a digital printing press, and have worldwide distribution.

“A powerful global conversation has begun,” they wrote. “Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.”