On April 23, 2005, Jawed Karim uploaded an 18-second video to a site called YouTube that he helped create. We'll get back to that video shortly, but let's take a minute to think about what nine years means in the digital age.

The web was a very different place. The title of "social media maven/guru/ninja" was just a twinkle in some charlatan's eye. Twitter was still about a year away from existence, and an early iteration of the Facebook we now know was just gaining traction on college campuses.

Heck, we had yet to meet the ubiquitous viral video back in April 2005. And online media had yet to suffer through many hard years before discovering the life-giving secrets of the listicle, heartwarming advertisement and fatuous cat video. In short, the social explosion had yet to make the web the — Epic! Unbelievable! Shocking! — look-at-me, click-on-this cacophony it is today.