Web Masters

Flickr, the Internet's original photo sharing website, actually began as a feature in a game. But the feature quickly got more popular than the game itself. Soon, it became a massive company leading the Web 2.0 revolution and changing how people shared content online.

But, as interesting as the story of Flickr is, it can't match the story and opinions of its founder, Caterina Fake.

On this episode of Web Masters, Caterina joins Aaron to talk a little about Flickr and a lot about her thoughts on the Internet, digital culture, and how the Web has impacted the way people interact with each other.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

When you see something funny and snap a great pic or grab an awesome video, you’ve got tons of options for where to post it. Instagram. YouTube. TikTok. Twitter. Reddit. Facebook. Maybe LinkedIn if it’s not too NSFW.

At the very least, posting your entertaining content might make your friends chuckle. If you’re lucky, it could even go viral and give you a solid 15 minutes of fame. But what would you have done with that content before social media? Where would you have shared it?

Josh Abramson helped solve that problem. When he was a freshman, he and his best friend from high school, Ricky Van Veen, launched a website called CollegeHumor.com. People would send College Humor their funny stories, pictures, and videos, and they would post them.

Sure, we’ve moved well beyond that way of sharing user-generated content, but the 1990s were a different time on the Internet, and, as you'll hear in this episode of Web Masters, promoting new websites relied on different types of strategies.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

You might not know exactly what it is off the top of your head, but you've surely heard of Metcalfe's Law. Where did it come from? What does it mean? And why does it matter?

That's what you'll learn on this episode of Web Masters when Aaron talks with Bob Metcalfe, the law's namesake. Bob explain's the law's critical insight on how multimedia networks operate and scale and offers some unique perspective on the implications of network growth.

In addition to his insights about Metcalfe's law, Bob also talks about his work inventing ethernet, the backbone of local area networks, and how he founded the multi-billion-dollar 3Com corporation. In other words, a lot of what all of us do on the Internet every day is thanks to the work of Bob Metcalfe.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Even if you’ve never personally bought anything from Etsy, you surely know it’s a marketplace for crafters and homemade goods. The company is so large, it’s basically become synonymous with the industry it supports. If you want something homemade, custom, and unique, you don’t go to Amazon or Walmart. You go to Etsy.com.

Considering the enormous success of Etsy as a marketplace for crafters, you might assume it was built by people who were passionate about crafting. At the very least, you’d expect them to have a passing interest. But that’s actually not the case.

As Chris Maguire, one of the co-founders of Etsy explains in this episode of Web Masters, he and his team weren't passionate about crafting. However, they were passionate about helping people solve problems using software, and that's exactly what they did. The result was a multi-billion-dollar, publicly traded company that's changed the way people around the world shop for homemade goods.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

The current Internet is known as a place where anyone can publish anything... for better or for worse. However, in the earliest days of the Web, there were lots of questions about what kind of content would be acceptable, who was responsible for what got posted, and who could regulate speech online. Those questions were answered thanks to publications like Nerve.com

Launched in parallel with the signing of the Communications Decency Act in 1996, Nerve.com was one of the earliest websites to put the new law to the test by publishing thoughtful but explicit content that pushed the boundaries of what could and couldn't be written about on the Web. At its helm and directing the content was Genevieve Field, one of the pioneers of digital editing.

On this episode of Web Masters, you'll hear how Genevieve helped grow Nerve from a quirky online publication into a website with a global audience that was changing the tone of Internet content.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Web search existed before Lycos, but it wasn't very good. Michael Mauldin -- better known as Fuzzy -- helped change that when he released Lycos.

Lycos wasn't like any search engine that had come before it. Rather than passively waiting for pages to be submitted, Lycos actively crawled the Web -- like its namesake lycosa spider -- searching for new content it could share with users. Within months of its release, Lycos became one of the most popular search engines on the Internet, and it stayed that way for a few years. During that time, it pioneered many of the things about web search that most of us take for granted today.

So what happened? How did Google overtake Lycos to become the dominant search engine? Find out in this episode of Web Masters.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

You may or may not be someone who understands all the specific intricacies of marketing automation, but, no matter who you are, you’re  surely someone who’s impacted by it. As the Internet has grown into the foundation of modern society, the marketing automation industry has become one of the biggest and most successful beneficiaries. And one of the companies leading the marketing automation revolution was Eloqua.

Eloqua, along with its founder, Mark Organ, helped usher in the age of SaaS business models while supercharging the marketing processes for thousands of companies around the world. It was so successful, in fact, that Oracle acquired it for more than $800 million, and it’s now the backbone of their marketing platform.

But Eloqua's success wasn't quick or easy. Mark shares the unique story in this episode of Web Masters.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Yes, you’ve heard of Match.com. And you’re probably vaguely aware that Match.com was the first dating website. You might even know that Match.com is part of Match Group, Inc., which is a publicly traded, NASDAQ-100 company that also owns dating sites like Tinder, OkCupid, Hinge, and PlentyOfFish. But the Match.com you know about isn’t particularly similar to the Match.com Gary Kremen founded in 1993.

In fact, the site that became Match.com was actually founded before the World Wide Web even existed. When Gary launched it, he wasn't focused on dating. Instead, Gary recognized that the Web was great for anyone interested in connecting with other people in order to exchange goods and services.

That led Gary to start a company called Electric Classifieds, Inc. It was a technology company that built online classifieds software to compete with the classified advertising sections in newspapers. Online dating was, of course, an obvious use case. But Gary took it much farther than most people realize.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Despite Amazon’s immense success, it wasn’t the company that pioneered e-commerce. That honor belongs to an entrepreneur named Jason Olim and his online music store, CDNow.com. CDNow was one of the first -- if not the first -- large, consumer-focused e-commerce companies, eventually reaching a public valuation of over a billion dollars.

To give you an idea of just how early CDNow was in the e-commerce space, Jason and his team invented the online shopping cart. It literally didn’t exist before they created the first one.

Of course, today, you’ve probably never even heard of CDNow, while you’ve probably ordered a half dozen things from Amazon in the past week. So what happened? Why did the pioneer of e-commerce shutdown, while a company that came later managed to become one of the largest and most successful companies in history? Find out in this episode of Web Masters.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

The Internet killed magazines. Or, if it didn't kill them, it at least made magazines significantly less culturally relevant. But before it did all that, it managed to inspire the largest magazine ever published: The Industry Standard.

Back when the Internet seemed as likely to be a temporary phenomenon as it did an integral part of life, John Battelle launched The Industry Standard to explore the story of the emerging technology and examine how it was going to change the world. It quickly became the most popular publication for people in the Internet industry. If you cared about the Internet, you read it. And, if you wanted to "be someone" on the Internet, you advertised in it.

Soon, The Industry Standard would be so full of articles and advertisements that John's team literally didn't have the manpower to include anymore. Then the bubble burst, and... well... you'll have to listen to this episode of Web Masters to find out what happened.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.