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12:00 AM  Aug. 1, 2008
New Media Timeline (2004)
By David Shedden (More articles by this author)
Library Director, Poynter Institute

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Previous: 2003 / Next: 2005
View all of the years in the New Media Timeline

              SERVICES & TECH  

  • "Google Releases Orkut Social Networking Service." Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Watch, Jan. 22, 2004. (See also: Google's Orkut Web site.)

  • The Flickr photo sharing Web site is launched by the Ludicorp company in February 2004. (Yahoo! will purchase Ludicorp and Flickr in March 2005.)

  • The Facebook social networking site is started by Harvard University student Mark Zuckerberg during February 2004.

  •  "Googlemania!" Wired, March 2004.

  • "Sixty-three percent of e-mail users who responded to the Pew Internet & American Life survey said that the increase in junk e-mail has made them less trusting of e-mail as a communications tool, and more than three-quarters of respondents -- 77 percent -- said that spam makes being online unpleasant and annoying." (Source: Washingtonpost.com special section on Spam, March 17, 2004.)

  • "Who Should Govern the Net?"
    CNET, March 18, 2004.
  • On April 29, 2004, Google Inc. announces that it has filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of its Class A common stock.

  • "Worldwide shipments of mobile phones grew in the first quarter of 2004 compared with the same period last year, buoyed by strong demand for camera phones and color screens." (Source: ZDNet News, May 6, 2004) 
  • The Center for History & New Media, in partnership with colleagues at the University of Maryland and the Internet Archive, receive an award from the Library of Congress's National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program to build upon work done in connection with CHNM's Business Plan Archive, a two-year-old initiative to preserve records from the historic dot-com era of the late 1990s.
  • The FCC takes steps to encourage deployment of fiber optic broadband networks capable of delivering advanced data, video and voice service to the mass market by local telephone companies.

  • The Mozilla Firefox Web browser is officially released in November 2004. It is marketed as a secure alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

  • "Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year 2004:
    Based on your online lookups, the #1 Word of the Year for 2004 was Blog."
    Merriam-Webster Online, Nov. 2004.

  • "Should Your PC Be Your Telephone?"
    New York Times, Dec. 2, 2004.

  • On December 7, 2004, IBM announces that it is selling its PC business to China's Lenovo Group. (IBM's dominate role in the history of personal computers can be traced back to 1981 and the introduction of their first successful PC.)

  • "Google to Scan Famous Libraries."
    BBC, Dec. 14, 2004.
    Additional Resources

            THE MEDIA

  • "Although the economics are still evolving, the Internet has now become a major source of news in America. In September 2003, over half of the people in the United States - 150 million - went online, a record for Web use. And half to two-thirds of those who go online use it at least some of the time to get news. Whether the new medium is replacing the old, however, at this point is less clear." (Source: "The State of the News Media: Online Section." Project for Excellence in Journalism, March 2004.)

  • News Example:
    June 5, 2004 --
    "Remembering Reagan."
    (Source:
    Poynter's Links to the News)

  • "Significant numbers of Americans are turning to the Internet for news coverage and images they cannot find in the mainstream media. Over the last few months, war images have begun appearing online that were deemed too graphic and disturbing to be carried by the mainstream press. A significant number of Internet users, many of whom have explicitly gone looking for them, have seen these images online."
    (Source: "The Internet as a Unique News Source."
    Pew Internet & American
    Life Project, July 8, 2004.)

  • "We're All Journalists Now."
    Wired, August 11, 2004.

  • In September 2004 the Poynter Institute, the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media, and Eyetools release their results from the Eyetrack III study on Internet news-reading behavior.
    (Source: Eyetrack III, Poynter Online)

  • "Ceefax marks 30 years of service." BBC, Sept. 22, 2004.

  • " 'With more events like the CBS document scandal, bloggers could have the effect of forcing a closer look at journalistic integrity and a much wider line of separation between commentary and news reporting,' said Chad Shue of Everett, Washington."
    (Source: "Readers Speak: Online columns viewed cautiously, but are a vital new medium."
    Ryan Pitts, APME / Spokane Spokesman-Review,
    Oct. 13, 2004)

  • The Media Bloggers Association (MBA) is founded in November 2004.

  • The Online Publishers Association (OPA) announces that for the first time ever, content surpassed communications to become the leading online activity as measured by share of time spent online.
    (Source: Results from the IAI or Internet Activity Index)

  • "Milestones in Online Journalism."
    dotjournalism, Dec. 16, 2004.

  • "Bloggers, Citizen Media and Rather's Fall -- Little People Rise Up in 2004."
    OJR, Dec. 21, 2004.

  • News Example:
    December 26, 2004 --
    "South Asia Earthquake
    and Tsunami."
    (Source:
    Poynter's Links to the News)

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