I was there, at the dawn of the Information Era.

1993 - The Prodigy Era
I got online in 1993 - back when dial-up services like Prodigy and Compuserve were the only way to go "online." On those services, there were discussion groups on walking and volkssporting where we brave pioneers hung out.
What was Online: As an officer of the American Volkssport Association, I posted calendars of events and lists of walking clubs on Prodigy, Compuserve, GEnie, and the newbie America Online. I joined every online service I could just to make sure they had information about our walking events and clubs. We had some real characters on Prodigy who would post flaming messages on the politics of walking organizations. This led to an intense distrust of the online media by others in the organization. But I was not deterred.
Email: In those days, email was specific to the service. If you joined Prodigy, you could only send and receive email from others on Prodigy and couldn't email somebody on Compuserve.

Circa 1995 - The Birth of the Web
In 1995, I first logged onto the real Internet, using "Internet in a Box." And I discovered that I could have free web space and build my own web site through a local internet provider. I selected my login name of "walking" so my site would have a walking identity.
Walking Web Sites: I created and hosted The American Volkssport Association web site, listing the clubs and events.
My Hiking and Walking Homepage was also born also in early 1995, as a feature of the EINet Galaxy.
Reebok had an excellent web site - Planet Reebok, with information on walking and running events.
Meanwhile, Nike kept posting messages saying it would have a great web site...soon.
Walking Magazine was very slow to transition to having a web site, leaving a void on walking information that longed to be filled.
Email Discussion Groups: In this era, email went global. Not only could you begin to email friends whether they were on a different online service or internet provider, but my personal account allowed me to create a discussion group listserve. Walklist was born, with hundreds of subscribers discussing walking and volkssport events.
Other walking groups born in this era were the Racewalking group and the PedNet pedestrian activist group.

Fame and Infamy
I was there early and I conquered the walking niche. It is a small niche, enough so that my hobby in the 90's was picking up books and magazines about the Internet and seeing both of my web sites listed. The New Balance Shoes web site linked to my sites and called me "the ubiquitous Wendy Bumgardner."

But a prophet is without honor in her own country. The seeds of distrust sewn by the toxic Prodigy experience lingered on. I saw only glazed eyes amongst my fellow volkssport walkers when I described our web site. I was even ordered by the president of the organization to "stop wasting your time and do something productive." I told her it was either create the walking web sites or a Star Trek fan site, and she gave up reasoning with me and let me go on.

1997 - 2000 The Boom
I was recruited secretly in late 1996 to join a venture that became About.com, to be their Walking Guide. Our mission was to create a great user experience by indexing the best online resources for our topics. Now I was being paid to surf the web for walking material.
Excellent web sites were created by health care organizations on how to walk and the benefits of walking - Group Health Network and The Mayo Clinic were notable.
Walking coaches such as Jeff Salvage, Dave McGovern, and Warren and Patty Finke posted articles or full books they had written on walking, racewalking, and marathon training.
Healthcentral.com became an excellent source of the latest news and research on fitness, exercise, weight management and sports injuries.
Online shopping began to take off, with the catalog shop Roadrunnersports.com and the outdoor sports store chain REI.com being my favorites.
Active.com provided a great event calendar for walking and running events, as well as fitness and training information. Asimba.com sponsored events such as the Portland to Coast Walk.
Hundreds of walking clubs and organizations went online with web sites and began to use email as a way to reach their members. My seminars on this at walking conventions were packed with enthusiasts.

2001 - The Bust
The Internet Bubble burst. Many great web sites packed with information died as their capital was spent. Sites that had provided free web sites for walking clubs also died, forcing a constant search for a new home.
Health care organizations merged and often purged their web sites of health information for the public.
Walking Magazine, so late coming to the web, ended publication altogether.
Nike's web site continues to ignore its biggest market - walkers.
New Balance Shoes provides good walking content.
At Walking.about.com I had been building tutorials and high-quality content of my own since 1997, ensuring walkers still had free sources of information despite the Internet shake-out.
My daily Walk of Life 10-Week Program proved to be a tremendous hit, with thousands participating.

The Future
Walking clubs are now sold on email and web sites as inexpensive ways to reach their members and the public. That will continue to grow.
The online world will continue to change, eventually figuring out how to support the expenses of providing information with income from advertising and other sources.
We have built it, they have come, now to make it support itself!
Now, somebody tell Nike about walkers...