The Web as we know it has been in constant evolution. Many of us may be totally oblivious to this fact, but I can remember a day before there was high-speed Internet, social networks, cloud computing, mobile devices, and iPads. A day when you had to install AOL discs to get a limited amount of hours of “Dial-Up Internet” access. A day when you couldn’t use Dial-Up Internet and talk on your home phone at the same time. A day when the Internet was a bunch of static HTML websites of corporate companies.

In just the last 16 years, we’ve seen the Internet go from being an irrelevant feature on our computers to being the #1 thing we use everyday. In just 16 years, we’ve seen the Internet disrupt the music industry, the newspaper industry, the television industry, and almost every other industry in-between. So just for a little fun, I thought I’d take you on a journey through the Past, Present, and Future of the Internet as we know it.

For those of you who use WordPress to promote your business or personal blog, here are some killer plugins that I would recommend for your site. These are plugins that I’ve used personally and for clients. They’ve each helped me expand and grow my business and personal blog.

Plus they’re all FREE!

1. My Brand – Lets you create your own custom login page with your own custom logo. Great way to personalize your site. Also a great tool if you build WordPress sites for clients.
2. Under Construction – Lets you work on your site behind the scene while visitors can only view your “Coming Soon” or “Under Construction” page. It also gives you the option to fully customize it.
3. WPtouch – Automatically transforms your WordPress site into an iPhone app theme. Great way to allow mobile viewers to visit and view your content on your site conveniently from their mobile devices.
4. WordPress.com Stats – Lets you track the number of hits and pageviews to your site daily. You can monitor which pages get the most traffic, where traffic is coming from, and more! You’ll need to enter in your API key once it’s installed. The rest is smooth sailing.

The Fortune 5,000,000 is what Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson from 37signals describe as the countless small businesses and organizations that continue to go underserved by creative professionals. These small businesses (ie. local restaurants, clothing and boutique shops, bookstores, success startups, grocery stores, car dealers, film companies, etc.) make up the largest percentage of businesses in the US.

As stated in one of their posts…

“It’s time to care about the Fortune 5,000,000. Forget the enterprise market. Forget the mid-sized company market. Build for the smallest of small companies and you’ll find a thirsty, neglected market waiting for you.” -37signals

However, what we read about in newspapers, blogs and magazines, and hear about on the news and radio are the successes and failures of large and popular companies. These companies make the cover of the New York Times and CNN headline news. They boast hundreds and even thousands of employees with millions and billions of dollars in annual revenue. And for decades, the overarching focus for many creative professionals has been to market their creative services to these types of companies. Why? The bigger the company, the bigger the account.

But what continues to go underserved are the Fortune 5,000,000.

I started using Twitter in April of 2008. Fairly new to this phenomena, I set up an account after catching wind of it from a close friend of mine. I spent the first few hours trying to figure out how this social network would catch on. By the end of the week, I was hooked. Since then, I’ve met hundreds of people, built new relationships and contacts, and have seen Twitter grow from 400,000 to over 7,000,000 in just a year. Now, everybody’s on Twitter. You’d be surprised to find your parents on it. lol.

However, some of us are a little more addicted to Twitter than others. Sad to say, Twitter has become a part of our lifestyle. With an average of 27,000,000 tweets a day flying across the web and mobile devices, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to see cases of people being diagnosed with an addiction to Twitter. Can you imagine an MTV episode of “True Life: I’m a Twitterholic”?