(On March 14, 2006, a luncheon marking the 10th anniversary of the launch of chicago.tribune.com as a full-service news and information site was held at the Arts Club of Chicago. The following essay introduced the souvenir booklet that each attendee received. There is also a photo gallery on this site.)
Fellow digerati:
Ten years ago today, chicago.tribune.com served up 31,001 HTML pages to a worldwide audience that probably wasn’t too worldwide.
Actually, for a while in the wee small hours of that morning, the folks in Room 500 were worried that we would serve up zero pages. Here we had this huge promotion box on Page One of the newspaper announcing our arrival, a story in the Business section too, and at 4 a.m. you could still point your browser at our brand new address and see . . . nothing.
Well, that got fixed. Lots of other things have gotten fixed along the way, too. So how best to summarize the path from thirty-thousand-and-change to two-million-and-change? (more…)