Show In A Box (SIAB)

⸺ by Charles Iliya Krempeaux

The era was the year 2007 to the year 2010.

Back then, video on the Internet and the was just starting to be practical — it wasn't before.

Show In A Box, often initialized to as “SIAB”, was the first open-source social-media software for video — and it was decentralized social-media software.

In this era, both decentralized social-media networks and centralized social-media networks were popular.

The centralized social-media network Twitter was not popular yet, and was just getting started — at the time it was mainly populated by very early adopters. MySpace was the popular centralized social-media network in this era — it had a lot to do with why another centralized social-media network, YouTube, initially got popular. Although, back then, YouTube was mainly used as a way of sharing videos on MySpace (as an embed on MySpace) — because it was the only free video hosting website that supported playing video in (a non defunct technology known as) Flash. MySpace's decline later led to the rise of yet another cenralized social-media network: Facebook.

A popular decentralized social-media network, in this era, was what was then called the — the distributed network of s (often shorterned as “s“). Although during this era, there was still some debate (that began in the late 1990s) over whether to call one of these a “”, or a “”, or a “”. As the story goes — “” won, got concatenated as “” — someone (not knowing “weblog” = “web” + “log”) thought it was a concatenation for “we” + “blog” (i.e., ) and shortened it to “”.

Many people had wanted to do video over the Internet, and then the Web for years (if not decades). As blogs rose as a popular form of social-media, some people wanted to do video over blogs. A community was formed around this idea via a mailing-list — the . The mailing-list attracted many people interested in video on the Internet and the Web.

At least one person from the shoterned “video blog” to “vlog”. Although “video log” (without the “b”) may have also been shortened to “vlog”.

A conference related to the was created — .

And a small number of people from the created Show in a Box (SIAB):

See Also