Digital Rolling Stone: You've Come a Long Way, Baby

As it celebrates its fortieth birthday, Rolling Stone magazine continues to innovate, proving it's not yet ready to grow old.

Using a state-of-the-art interface that mirrors Adobe's Reader, visitors to Rolling Stone's Web site can, for the first time, read the latest issue of magazine—including all the ads—page by page, online, for free.

Additionally, readers can now buy a DVD-ROM box set featuring a digital version every past Rolling Stone issue—that's 1,026 magazines and over 115,000 pages.

"It's like having 40 years of issues with hyper librarian find anything and everything you want instantly," David Anthony, the publisher responsible for the DVD's release, told BostonNow. "We've made reading the magazine a very interactive. If you are a big fan of Cameron Crowe it's very easy to find every article he wrote for the magazine. Once you find what you want, you can then create your own mini anthology."

Rolling Stone has always been a trailblazer of its industry, from its early start as a counterculture hippie rag to unleashing gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson into the world.

It was also one of the first magazines with an Internet presence.

With a nod to Rolling Stone's latest archiving venture, I prowled Archive.org's Wayback Machine to go back and check out how the magazine's Web site has progressed throughout the years. Unfortunately many of the graphics are missing, but you can get a general idea of how the site looked in its early days.

Here is the first-ever page, registered June 6, 1997. It's basically a place-marker set by the Web site host, Firefly.

Within six months, the Web site was up and running. Check out the sparse text-based home page. You can click on the links to see some really flashy HTML programming.

A year later, the site took on a stylish, magazine-like home page—imagine that large, missing graphic as a full-color photo—and added "Rolling Stone Radio", as well as an A-Z artist look-up service that linked to the now-defunct music download service, tunes.com.

By the time Y2K rolled in, the site was beginning to look more like what we expect to see today. Check out the now-staple features like MP3s and webcasts. Remember, this was nearly eight years ago.

Rolling Stone's Web site also hosted a thriving Internet public forum that was shut down in May, 2004, because of continuous abuse and code-hacking. During its peak, though, readers throughout the world chimed in on everything from politics to Britney. For a startling—but creepy—glimpse into the past, take a look at these forum postings from September 14, 2001—just days after 9/11.

The site took on its current look around 2005.

By the way, the Wayback Machine is a fascinating tool for checking out how magazine Web sites have developed throughout the decade. Some other sites worth exploring are Time, Sunset magazine (its URL once belonged to someone else), the San Francisco Bay Guardian (all the way back to 1996!), and my favorite, SF State's [X]press.