Category: Walking the Web

Here is the entire collection of my Walking the Web comic that explored the history of the World Wide Web, from start to finish.
You can also view it as an entire series on a single blog page over at the National Writing Project’s Digital Is site.
Peace (in the history),
Kevin

Wrapping up my comic — Walking the Web — didn’t feel right without this final metacomic …

Peace (in the comic in the comic in the ..),
Kevin

And so, it ends. Sort of. The boys in my comic — Walking the Web — have made it back home. I wanted to reference the movie, Looper (and if you know the movie, you know how this last comic could have gone), but could not bring myself to go that far. So, I do have the boys meeting themselves, and left it at that. But it made sense to have the soundtrack of Timbuk 3 running in your head as the series comes to an end. (Depending on your interpretation of the lyrics, that could be good or bad.)

Peace (on the web),
Kevin

PS — I have one more comic to run tomorrow. It’s not technically part of the series, and yet … it is.

If you spend enough time reading articles or watching interviews with the folks behind the major sites in the Web’s history (most of which lines data ghost towns), you realize that one phrase keeps popping up in the mouths of the site leaders, and often, it spells the beginning of the end of the site. (Are you there, Friendster? AOL? Yahoo? MySpace? And will you survive, Facebook?) The boys in my comic — Walking the Web — notice it, too.

Peace (outside those portals),
Kevin

I won’t claim to know all that much about programming but clearly, the Ruby on Rails suite of web developer tools has opened a lot of doors for interactive web-based ideas. So, it made sense to introduce a personified Ruby to the boys in my comic, Walking the Web, as they explore the history of the Web.

Peace (on the rails),
Kevin

The boys in my comic — Walking the Web — think they see a dangerous creature. It’s the open-source Mozilla, springing from the ashes of Netscape, and gearing up to launch Firefox. Google Chrome can’t be too far down the road, right? When you think of it, the browser wars have been an interesting, and unexpected, development, right?

Peace (in the browser wars),
Kevin

I admire Bill Gates for his push into philanthropy (but not so much his push into education). The boys in my comic meet Gates right at the moment when Microsoft realized, a bit too late, that the Web was the place to be, not the desktop. Oh well.

Peace (in the strip),
Kevin

Before folks launch into me here, I know that Marc Andreessen has done other things since he and his partner, Eric Bina, created the Mosaic browser (which became the basis for Netscape). Ning is just one of Andreessen’s many ventures. But the boys in my comic, Walking the Web, only see his role in history as helping to develop and release Mosaic because, in historical terms, that is his one great achievement, and all done while still very young and living on pizza and cookies and milk (according to various bios).




Peace (in the browser),
Kevin

We’re so used to graphic interfaces that we forget that the first generation of browsers were all text-based applications. The boys in my webcomic Walking the Web find that interesting … but the lack of flash is kind of boring to them.

Peace (in the text),
Kevin