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By Julian Goldsmith, 7 July 2008 15:20

COMMENT

silicon.com is 10 this week. That's a grand old age for a publication launched at the height of the dot-com madness, says Julian Goldsmith.

The 1998 launch party for silicon.com was held at the dinosaur hall of the Natural History Museum in west London. The choice of venue was not by chance.

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At the event, silicon.com founder Rob Lewis provided the assembled guests with branded bin-bags to dispose of their now-redundant paper tech mags. It was an audacious gesture that was about - well - 10 years early.

In contrast to many other pure-play dot-com ventures, silicon.com took the task of carving out a solid business model very seriously.

Acquiring revenue in the first couple of years was a hard task and it meant staff from all parts of the business - editorial, sales, marketing and IT development pulled together in a way not really seen at other, bigger publishers.

The atmosphere in the office was very much one of exploration. The business processes around producing and selling an online publication were at the time non-existent, so we had the luxury of establishing our own. It was light-hearted and noisy. There was a buzz about the place, especially when advertisers started to get it and the money started to roll in.

This sense of fun filtered out into the content on the site, which was a breath of fresh air compared with the stuffy stories on the paper tech magazines at the time. This, and the use of video streaming got the publicity machine excited about the potential of the multi-media coverage silicon.com could offer.

The fact most viewers, downloading from 48Kbps dial-up links - this was 1998 after all - struggled to view the video was conveniently ignored by all.

But this ability to produce video put us alongside broadcasters in some people's eyes, which meant journalists got interviews with people who would not normally have had anything to do with such a new title.

It's a real privilege to be involved in a new medium and the experience gained by everyone on the silicon.com launch has made them eminently employable throughout the media.

Even now, most of the conventional media has little idea about how to produce and monetise an online brand successfully and are just beginning a learning curve silicon.com started out on a decade ago.

Journalists who worked there have gone on to such organisations as Al Jazeera, the BBC, Channel 4, CNN, The Guardian and Times Online. Others have carried on in business titles, such as Building, Regeneration and Renewal, and Retail Week. Some have even stayed on at silicon.com.

Here's a flavour of what some of the team that helped get silicon.com off the ground think about it:

John Bernstein - silcon.com editor 1997 - 2002: "We chose the Dinosaur Room of the Natural History Museum for the launch of silicon.com. And if that not-so-subtle symbolism was lost on any of the print journalists invited, our founder threw a selection of the tech trade weeklies over his shoulder. 'Print is dead. Long live the internet'.

"Did we believe it or were we just trying to get column inches in those trades we'd so disparaged? I'm still not sure but the fact that 10 years on silicon.com continues to prosper is a tribute to the risk-taking and dedication of the team down the years."

Graham Hayday - launch team member and silicon.com editor 2002 - 2003: "Being part of a genuinely innovative enterprise that employed some of the most talented and generally lovely people I've ever worked with was fantastic. Seeing many of them made redundant as the online economy crashed was horrible.

"It's more than horrible to think that two of my ex-colleagues are no longer with us. But my overriding memories are of an amazing five years or so in my career. We worked hard (on the whole), laughed a lot, almost got banned from a major hotel chain (good to see the CEO leading by example there), had a garden gnome as the news desk mascot and enjoyed some legendarily debauched parties - what more could you want?"

Tony Hallett - launch team member and silicon.com editor 2003 - 2007: "silicon.com was a particularly exciting place to be in the late 1990s. I remember our launch stirred up the market - in wider media circles, not just tech or business - because we were actually acting on everyone's long-term predictions: that media would move online, that it'd embrace video and so on.

"As we launched, I was thrown in the deep end - I was spending nights in hospital, due to a family illness at that time, days trying to catch France 98 World Cup games, and the hours in between writing and preparing video. I don't think I slept.

"For the video, I was instructed to buy some make-up. It could have been a practical joke - nowadays the teams rarely put on slap for any video pieces - or maybe someone realised it'd help hide the bags under my eyes. Not that you could tell when video was streamed at 58Kbps and a constant message on screens was 'Buffering'."

What else was happening in 1998? Get the lowdown here…