I’ve had a Web presence since, I don’t remember when. It was sometime back in the 1990s, maybe even a decade ago, that I started publishing to Compuserve’s “Our World”. I later registered my own personal domain and re-launched my Web site there.

But what was the subject of Web site number one in 1989?

“When the Web was started, it was started as a mechanism for sharing high energy particle physics data,” said Professor Rebecca Grinter of Georgia Tech’s College of Computing.

The creator of that Web site, Tim Berners-Lee, wanted experts to be able to share data on particle smashing, even if they weren’t at CERN in Switzerland where he was doing research. CERN, in Geneva, is the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
– Web reaches new milestone: 100 million sites, CNN.com

Netcraft reported yesterday that the Web now has 100 million Web sites. This is really an extraordinary number. A “domain name” is the top-level name in a link, eg: blogspot.com, yahoo.com, and so on. All the blogs hosted under blogspot.com, including this one, all fall under the same domain name, and only count as one Web site:

There are now more than 100 million web sites on the Internet, which gained 3.5 million sites last month to continue the dynamic growth seen throughout 2006. In the November 2006 survey we received responses from 101,435,253 sites, up from 97.9 million sites last month.

The 100 million site milestone caps an extraordinary year in which the Internet has already added 27.4 million sites, easily topping the previous full-year growth record of 17 million from 2005. The Internet has doubled in size since May 2004, when the survey hit 50 million.

Blogs and small business web sites have driven the explosive growth this year, with huge increases at free blogging services at Google and Microsoft. …
– November 2006 Web Server Survey, Netcraft