While attending an Awards Banquet for Excellence in Broadcasting in 1993, I heard keynote speakers from companies like Comcast and Time/Warner television make references to an emerging phenomenon they were calling the Information Super Highway. I sat and listened, absorbed and fascinated by what they were describing. Television programming being sent to your cel phone, a wealth of information accessible from anywhere, instant communications with anyone in the world and so much more. I was hooked.

Looking back, I would have to say that they didn't know how right they were, and at the same time, how much they miscalculated just how far technology would evolve in a short period of time. Whether you realize it or not we have all been witnesses to this on-going evolution.

You could spend all day elaborating on cel phone technology, Ipads and all the latest hand-held gear, but I want to devote this article primarily to the Internet. After all, everything else is a moot point without it.

At the time I sat listening to these visionaries describe the future, we already had our favorite Internet Service Providers, whether it was AOL, CompuServe or Prodigy, and we were connecting to them through a 56k modem. Life was good.

It wasn't long after that we saw the dawning of the Dot Com era and high speed Internet: a boom when companies and people were teased by the Internet and left wanting more. Many corporation's marketing departments wanted desperately to create a presence on the World Wide Web and tech savvy folks were happy to give it to them at a hefty price. It was truly a "revenge of the nerds" scenario. Folks made tons of money pumping out millions of new websites full of glitz and glamour. You couldn't visit a web site without being bombarded by flash animation, .wav files and animated .gif files. It was all shiny, new and pretty. Unfortunately that's all it was at that time. Once the newness wore off and people up-graded to high speed Internet connections it became obvious that these glamour sites really had nothing to offer visitors except the fancy paint jobs.

Although many dotcoms died a quick and painful death, we were drawn by this small taste of the idea that the Internet could be so much more in terms of information, communication and interactivity. The companies that survived the dotcom crash started re-tooling their web presence. The overall look of sites was maturing into a more aesthetically pleasing, less resource intensive appearance. More importantly, much more effort was being placed on content and interactivity. People wanted to be part of this new found frontier.

Ebay was one of the first to emerge from the retooling of the web. It was sleek, interactive and available for all to use. “Use” was the hook. You could now “use” a website instead of just visiting one. It became the rage. But what if you weren’t interested in participating in auctions? Internet surfers wanted to latch onto something they could “use” interactively. How about a video site that could share videos among a few friends? Or a site created merely to stay in touch with the local music scene? Sound a little far fetched? Say hello to YouTube and Myspace.

In a rather strange turn of events, the masses starving for this interactive technology found these two sites as opposed to the sites finding them. Users were tickled pink. They could broadcast themselves as well as create a personal presence on the web, all for free.

With all the new “user” interactive technology, faster connection speeds, and the huge success of YouTube and MySpace it was off to the races once again. This time around there were well trained folks in the Internet and related professions creating these kinds of offerings. Prices for hosting services and the technology to best utilize the web became very affordable, if not free. A new catch phrase also surfaced: the term “social network” made its way into our daily vernacular. The developers of new social network or Content Manage Systems like Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal were so anxious to share their work and let the world see how far they were pushing the envelope, that another catch phrase came into use for those who wanted to create this type of presence on the web. It was coined “Open Source”. In short, this meant FREE.