Web 25: histories from the first 25 years of the World Wide Web

If, on the one side, the web offers us a platform where content is searchable and replicable, on the other one, it cannot be forgotten that web content is perishable, unstable and subject to continuous change. This is a challenge for scholarly research about the historical development of web. The research here presented analyzed the historical development of weblogs in Italy investigating their technological, cultural, economic, and institutional dimensions. The approach chosen mixed participant observation, in-depth interviews, and semiotic analysis of blogs and blog posts. Since an important part of the research was about the development of platforms, graphics, layouts, and technology, beside interviews older versions of blogs were retrieved using Internet Wayback Machine. Even if partial versions of the blogs were archived, this part of the research was important to complete data obtained with interviews and blogs’ analysis, since individual memory is not always accurate or some blogs were in the meanwhile closed and original posts were not accessible anymore.