Reflections on 30 years of the dot-com

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Tomorrow, June 8, marks the 30th anniversary of my launch of ClariNet.com. In the 1980s, there was a policy forbidding commercial use of the internet backbone, but I wanted to do a business there and found a loophole and got the managers of NSFNet to agree, making ClariNet the first company created to use the internet as a platform, the common meaning of a "dot-com."

Back 20 years ago I wrote a history of those days and the other early internet business ventures:

The history of ClariNet.com

Today I have released on Forbes.com a new series of reflections of what went right and what went wrong as media moved online in the last 3 decades. I consider the consequences of advertising becoming the vastly dominant mode of funding online business, as well as the decline of all the serial media, phone calls and E-mails.

Reflections on the 30th anniversary of the dot-com

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It takes some doing to be the founder of the 'first' dot-com, and yet not be among the 100,000+ people who made big money via Internet-related businesses in the following 30 years, despite the vast advantages Brad had relative to almost anyone else in the business in 1989, via inheriting both wealth and connections from his father.

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The "test" comment above is there because I am finding more and more that my comments, for whatever reasons, don't get through, even on blogs where I've been posting for years. I still prefer usenet to blogs, for the reasons you mention, but do follow some blogs. It is possible only because of RSS. I was happy with LiveClick, until it became incompatible with new versions of Firefox. On usenet, I've been using the same hardware and the same newsreader for a quarter of a century now.

Is there something similar to RSS in which I could invest some time to get it set up without having to worry that it will break with the next release of whatever software?

Newsgroups are mostly dead, so it's mailing lists, aggregation sites like google groups, or RSS these days.

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