Richard MacManus = Illuminati, according to Eran Globen and Ryan King from the Supr.c.ilio.us blog, November 2005. By October 2005, I was making a reasonable living from the web as a freelancer. I’d quit my New Zealand day job in August and was now earning income from various web consulting gigs, as well as from my...

Celebrating the formation of the Web 2.0 Workgroup at Jing Jing, Palo Alto. From left to right: Gabe Rivera, Dave Winer, me, Mike Arrington, Fred Oliveira; photo by Dave Winer. During my stay at the TechCrunch ranch, Mike Arrington, Fred Oliveira and I had been discussing how to better team up. At the time, creating...

Me at the Yahoo! cafe, URL’s, on 10 October 2005; photo by Jeremy Zawodny. Earlier in 2005, I had made some contacts inside of Yahoo! and had begun to think about trying for a job there. One of my contacts was a search engine executive named Elizabeth Osder, and I’d told her my dream gig on the internet would be web...

Leading my posse into a Web 2.0 party… no, just kidding, this was someone much cooler than me; photo by Kris Krug. The Colors of Web 2.0 Party was held on Thursday, October 6, 2005, at Swig — a modern bar spread over two floors in Geary St, a few blocks up from Union Square. The event notice on Upcoming.org read,...

Web 2.0 Conference signage; photo by Gen Kanai. When I walked into the Web 2.0 Conference at the Argent the next morning, a Thursday, I poured myself a cup of hotel coffee and wandered over to one of the round high tables in the foyer, where I’d spotted a couple of people I recognized. It was two of a small Irish...

My press badge for the Web 2.0 Conference, October 2005. The Web 2.0 Conference kicked off on Wednesday, October 5, 2005, at The Argent Hotel on Third Street in San Francisco. I’d gone into the city on the Caltrain earlier in the week, to take in the sights of Haight St and familiarize myself with the Union Square...

A reader emailed me this screenshot of RWW in March 2005, in order to point out the MyYahoo Ticker at the bottom of the screen. “My RSS headlines stream on the bottom of my screen all day and I click things that catch my eye,” he told me. Part 5 of my serialized book, Bubble Blog, describes my first trip to Silicon...

For two weeks in October 2005, this room was where TechCrunch, Read/Write Web, WeBreakStuff and tech.memeorandum were published. On a Friday afternoon at the end of September 2005, I stepped foot on American soil for the first time. I was greeted at San Francisco Airport by a big guy with tousled light brown hair,...

My Tim O’Reilly interview after the first Web 2.0 Conference, Nov 2004. I hadn’t gone to the first Web 2.0 Conference in October 2004, but I monitored it from afar. I was intrigued by the potential start of a new movement on the web, so I reached out to Tim O’Reilly and asked to interview him for my blog. He agreed...

Marc Andreessen, bare feet and all, on the cover of TIME magazine in Feb 1996. At the beginning of 2004, Netscape founder Marc Andreessen was doing just fine financially and had no shortage of attention. But he was trying to adapt to a new Web era. At the time he was Chairman of Opsware, the business software...

A scene from the first Web 2.0 Conference in Silicon Valley, October 2004. In-between trying to get linked to by an A-Lister in the blogosphere, I inadvertently turned myself into a journalist. In March 2004, I interviewed Marc Canter, a Silicon Valley resident who was internet famous in the 1980s. Twenty years...

I was a long way from Silicon Valley at the beginning of 2004, both geographically and in frame of mind. I’d recently turned 32, had fine strawberry blond hair that I obsessively brushed to keep neat, innocent-looking blue eyes covered by a pair of rectangular, semi-rimless glasses, and a ginger goatee with neatly...