July 2, 2010 12:15 PM

In honour of Canada Day, I'm updating my list of Canadians who contributed to the Internet, cyberculture, or enabling technology. These are Canadian inventors, researchers, developers, business leaders, academics, and writers who either contributed to the development of the Internet and our understanding of it.

• Chris Albinson, venture capitalist, co-founder of C100, expat Canadian tech network
  
• Jim Balsillie, CEO of Research In Motion
  
• Michel Beaudet, creator of online humour videos Têtes à claques
  
• Alexander Graham Bell - without him all those on dial-up would be out of luck
• Tim Bray, father of XML & co-founder of Open Text (early web search engine)
• Rhiannon Bury, academic, studies women and online fandom
• Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, pioneer in use of tagging
• Bill Buxton, Microsoft's principal researcher, pioneer in field of human computer interaction
• Garrett Camp, co-founder and CEO of StumbleUpon
  
• Ann Cavoukian, privacy czar, effective in promoting greater privacy controls in social network sites, particularly Facebook
  
• Vincent Cheung, creator of Shape Collage
  
• William Craig, founder of iCraveTV, the first company to stream TV over the Net
• Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X, Microserfs, JPod, etc.
• Ronald Deibert, researchers and campaigner against Internet censorship and cyber-espionage
  
• Peter Deutsch, leader of the team that invented Archie, the first Internet search engine
• John Demco, creator and first registrar of the .ca domain
• Hossein Derakhshan - influential Iranian blogger
  
• Cory Doctorow, activist, blogger & co-editor of Boing Boing
• Michael Geist, academic, leader in field of Internet law
• William Gibson, fiction author, visionary of cyberculture, coined term "cyberspace"
• James Gosling, inventor of Java programming language
• Kevin Ham, the world's leading domainer
• Caroline Haythornthwaite, researcher on social networking, e-learning, & online collaboration & communities
  
• Graham Hill, founder of environmental blog site, TreeHugger
• Donna Jodhan, campaigner for web accessibility, launching the first federal court case demanding greater accessibility of government websites
  
• Brian Kernighan, computer scientist, creator of "Hello, world" program, popular for training novice programmers (it was the first code I ever wrote)
• Lake Minnewanka Squirrel - Internet meme of scene-stealing rodent
• Deidre LaCarte, creator of Hampster Dance, believed to be the first Internet meme
  
• Mike Lazaridis, founder of Research in Motion
  
• Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP, open source advocate
  
• Pierre Lévy, academic, developed notions of collective intelligence
• mafiaboy, prominent website hacker
• Marc MacKenzie, winner of most beautiful Twitter message
• Lane Merrifield, co-founder of Club Penguin, developer of children's virtual worlds
  
• Michael Mulley, DIY developer of government transparency website, openparliament.ca
  
• Ryan North, writer and creator of online comic Dinosaur Comics
  
• Emma Payne, author and founder of Wired Women
• Rob Pike, co-creator of UTF-8, a unicode standard
  
• Gerri Sinclair, founder of Canada's first multimedia research centre at Simon Fraser, founded NCompass Labs, content management software
• Mark Rivkin Andrew Rivkin, founders of online gambling tech company, Cryptopogic
  
• Mark Rzepka, pioneer of online pharmacies
• Jay Steele, founder of Viigo, news aggregator app for Blackberry
  
• Jeffrey Skoll, co-founder of eBay
• Star Wars Kid, another Internet meme star
  
• Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics
• Clive Thompson, journalist has written for Shift, Wired
• Jutta Treviranus, advocate and researcher on web accessibility, lead author of authoring tool accessibility guidelines
  
• Barry Wellman, academic, pioneer in studies of online communities & social networking
• Bob Young, founder of micropublisher, Lulu and former CEO of Red Hat

Blogger Profile: Glen Farrelly
Glen's experience in the Internet has covered the full spectrum from coding to content, and from planning to promotion. This gives him a unique ability to help direct a company’s online strategy, while also having the know-how to lead a project to successful completion.

Posted by Sue Ansell at July 2, 2010 12:15 PM

Categories: General Web 2.0

Comments

Jon Husband email - www.wirearchy.com

I was looking for, and disappointed to find absent from the list, two pioneers from Montreal:

1. Mitch Joel, social media marketing guru (for real, not an hyperbolic use of the word 'guru'), and

2. Michel Cartier, retired UQAM professor, publisher of www.constellationw.com and author of the book "La Société Émergente du 21e Siècle".

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