We Are Still the Web

We Are Still the Web

Written by Jay on August 5, 2025.

Twenty years ago, Kevin Kelly wrote an absolutely seminal piece for Wired. This week is a great opportunity to look back at it.

Twenty years ago, in August of 2005, Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly wrote “We are the Web” for the magazine. He begins by looking backwards ten years to 1995, a few months before a Netscape IPO would spur the web’s growth. There were, of course, many early adopters who believed in the promise of the web. But far more were critical of the web, believing that without massive consolidation, there would never be enough content or enough commerce to make the web truly viable.

They missed what was right in front of them. The audience.

Kelly next moves to his own present day, the web of 2005. The web he knew at the time didn’t consolidate, it became a place of open creation. He paints with a broad brush, but the pattern is relatively clear. It was the audience, the people using the web, that made it a success. Businesses, websites, and communities that embraced that were the first to succeed.

E-commerce sites like eBay helped prove that point, where it’s users literally created the content. Other platforms leaned into open API’s, which allowed content to spread beyond the walls of any one website and out in the halls of the public web. Forums sprung up on the backs of its contributors, and helped millions find what they were looking for. The open source movement exploded in that time, creating software that stood as the backbone of the web.

At the center of it all was participation. The web would literally be nothing without its audience collectively participating in the act of creation. Through that creation they contributed to what Kelly refers to as the “gift economy,” which “fuels an abundance of choices. It spurs the grateful to reciprocate. It permits easy modification and reuse, and thus promotes consumers into producers.” By 2005, the number of web pages had reached nearly 600 billion.

In no corner of the web was this more apparent than in the blogosphere.

No Web phenomenon is more confounding than blogging. Everything media experts knew about audiences – and they knew a lot – confirmed the focus group belief that audiences would never get off their butts and start making their own entertainment.

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What a shock, then, to witness the near-instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs, with a new one appearing every two seconds. There – another new blog! One more person doing what AOL and ABC – and almost everyone else – expected only AOL and ABC to be doing. These user-created channels make no sense economically. Where are the time, energy, and resources coming from?

The audience.

Blogging was something that nobody could predict. It began in personal sites like Justins Links and Carolines Diary. It spread in reaction to mainstream media and twenty four hour news outlets failing their audience in the uncertain and scary post 9/11 world. This led to political blogs like Instapundit, The Daily Dish, and the Drudge Report, that offered a different kind of reactive and editorialized reporting, often opening up to comments and participation directly from their audience.

Backed by blogging platforms like WordPress, Movable Type, LiveJournal, and Blogger, and catalyzed by the presidential election of 2004, blogging saw a huge rise leading up to Kelly’s piece. At the end of 2004, there were reportedly around 8 million blogs in existence. A year later, at the end of 2005, that number had grown to 30 million. According to some reports, there was anywhere from 30,000 to 70,000 blogs being created every single day.

There weren’t many people who could have predicted how popular and how essential blogging would be at that time. It was everything about the promise of the web, it’s most direct and active form of participation from its users.

Towards the end of his piece, Kelly flashes forward, to the year 2015. He predicts a web powered by open source, fueled entirely by active creators each participating in their own corner of the web. Blogging would continue, and open API’s would lead to an even wider range of possibilities. Some of these are interesting predictions, for instance that operating systems would largely move to the web and power a new wave of AI.

But what he didn’t see coming was that 2005 would also act as a sort of turning point. A final wave of active participation across the open web before people would go indoors, and move their participation into centralized platforms and social media networks that feed proprietary algorithms.

That was twenty years ago. It’s a useful time to reflect on the lessons of 2005 which have, in some ways, been reversed.

There are still a lot of blogs, 600 million by some accounts. But they have been supplanted over the years by social media networks. Commerce on the web has consolidated among fewer and fewer sites. Open source continues to be a major backbone to web technologies, but it is underfunded and powered almost entirely by the generosity of its contributors. Open API’s barely exist. Forums and comment sections are finding it harder and harder to beat back the spam. Users still participate in the web each and every day, but it increasingly feels like they do so in spite of the largest web platforms and sites, not because of them.

And yet, we are in an interesting moment of uncertainty. Many people have found way to subvert the norms of the web of the past 10 years. They have escaped to something more fragmented, where their data isn’t scraped and monetized. Just as in 1995, experts are predicting that this is not sustainable, and that platforms will consolidate in pursuit of profit. Once again, they are focused on where the money’s going to come from.

It’s possible that we’re still missing what’s right in front of us. The audience.

The web was created for participation, by its nature and by its design. It can’t be bottled up long. In 2005, blogging was the answer to the question of what comes next. I look to history, and I’ve been wrong about the future many times. But I do know that the audience will tell us what’s next this time too.

If you look for it, there is compelling evidence that the tides are turning. Ted Gioia recently wrote about how audiences are looking for longer, more in-depth, and more “abundant” media than they have in years. Not because there is more available to them, but in spite of Silicon Valley and major media conglomerates trying to force them in the other direction, towards short form videos.

AI may be in trouble as people continue to insist that they would rather talk to one another than a robot. Independent journalists who create unique and authentic connections with their readers are now possible. Open social protocols that experts truly struggle to understand, is being powered by a community that talks to each other.

The web is just people. Lots of people, connected across global networks. In 2005, it was the audience that made the web. In 2025, it will be the audience again.