Webmaster- most of us not

Black belt in nothing

[Crush]

It sounds cool to your mates. " I am a webmaster" Because of the word master it sounds like you have a balck belt in karate or something.
The irony is to be a webmaster there are no formal qualifications so how can you be a master? A lot of guys here are master's of the couch potato.Anyone know where the term came from?

Looked on [en.wikipedia.org...] but there was nothing about the origin of the word.

[httpwebwitch]

some sources say the term may have derived from "postmaster".

There are a couple of instances of "webmaster" posted to the UseNet in July 1994. Humorously, the earliest instance uses the word in the phrase "WebMaster of the Universe"

I can't remember the first time I heard the word, but I'm pretty sure it was in common use before 1994.

[py9jmas]

RFC 2142 - Mailbox Names for Common Services, Roles and Functions from 1997 lists (amongst others) postmaster, hostmaster, and webmaster. These are 'well-known' aliases to help people contact the person responsible for mail, dns and webservers respectively.

[digitalghost]

"Master" is appended to a number of words, not because a person so named exhibits mastery of a skill, but rather, is master of that domain, no pun intended. Stablemaster, Quartermaster, Harbormaster, etc. Of course if you toss in 'brewmaster' the meaning of 'master' changes, clouding the issue a bit.

[httpwebwitch]

... but when was the term coined? The "Web" as CERN's "www" didn't emerge until the early 90s. I surfed the web in those early years, but didn't get involved in webmastery (building sites) per se until mid-1994.

There are a few people here who were mastering the Web in the years pre-1994. It would take a sharp memory to recall when the term entered the SysAdmin lexicon... Perhaps in the interest of etymological geek anthropology, we could entice some of our senior colleagues to look back through their early correspondence for instances of "webmaster" ..?

[Gomez]

The same kids who were 'Dungeon Masters' in Dungeons and Dragons turned into web saavy geeks and coined the phrase. I personally think the title is ridiculously vague and I don't like to tell people that I am a dungeon... err I mean webmaster.

[LifeinAsia]

Hmm, I don't know about it sounding cool. Nowadays (to me, anyway), a person describing themselves as a "webmaster" makes them sound like they have a 5-page web site about their vacation last summer made with Front Page and hosted on a free hosting site.

Although "webmaster" implied a lot of knowledge (compared to mere non-web mortals) 12 years ago (HTML, FTP, a graphics program, maybe some CGI programming), the web has evolved a lot since then. Now a "webmaster" really does need to be a master, knowing various scripting languages, database, server administration, virus/SPAM blocking, SEO, online community building, e-commerce, PPC advertising, affiliate programs, AdSense, perhaps Flash. But realistically, too many things to be able to do all of them well ("jack of all trades, master of none").

But I feel that "webmaster" still has the same connotation from the "old" days and doesn't really reflect the skill set in use today. Anyway, that's my rant.