20 years in IT history: Connectivity

Third, the culture decided that the Internet did not mean the end of business as we had known it, and everyone rose, stretched and sold off their tech stocks. Good-bye, Pets.com, Chipshot.com, and the rest.

2001: Blogs

People had been writing diaries on the Net for years, but the form had never taken off. In the late 1990s, editors appeared with several subtle enhancements, including browser-based website editing, comments, permalinks, blogrolls and trackbacks. These fixes turned Web diaries into blogs, and by 2001 blogs had become one of the great networking phenomena of the age.

The development of blogs illustrates a subtle point about connectivity. Conventional measurements of networks count nodes and bandwidth, but connectivity has at least a third dimension: adaptedness. Every object in a network has a trajectory of enhancements that allow it to work better and do more in a networked environment. One of the several ways in which connectivity is self-extending is that it provides an environment that selects for greater adaptivity to networking. As objects move down this path, as they mature, connectivity surges, even if nodes and bandwidth stay the same...which, of course, they never do.

2002: Sarbanes-Oxley