Rep. Douglas Feith Media Myth's 3/2/2007

Rule one of content management:

Don't put anything out, if you don't have anything. Especially if it's an ironic statement.

Rocket Boom held for ransom.

Via Adam Curry's RSS feed. Great Error message.

MSNBC: Update from Minneapolis

MSNBC posted this article from the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The editors must have been asleep when it got pass them.

nytimes.com: 1996

The New York Times was an innovator in the early years of the WWW. They were one of the first newspapers to deliver content online and they continued to offer the content for free (with registration) for many years. Once they had a contest to rewrite the motto 'All the news the fit to print' for their online edition. This early site from 1996 but with a 45K size main graphic was a pain to download over a 28 baud modem.

Gopher: early 1990's

The Gopher Procotol was a pre-http hypertext transfer protocol popular in the early 1990's. It was used a lot by colleges and researchers to shared information. Gopher forces a hierarchical site design similar to directories and files. The HTML markup language used for the world wide web allows for addressing other pages from any other pages. Although gopher once was more popular than ftp, there are not many gopher sites left. Voice of America continues to provides a gopher newsfeed, which is a precursor to rss feeds. Mozilla still supports the gopher protocol. The floodgap.com site has a gopher to web gateway so that you can still browse any gopher sites by Internet Explorer.

Bartcop.com: 1996

Lately, I've been looking for sites that were transitions from UseNet newgroups to Web pages. Bartcop is a great example. He started out as a chronic poster to alt.fan.rush-limbaugh and it evolved into a newsletter then to simple web pages. Now it's a full website with subscriptions, discussion groups, radio shows, advertisements. It's still has chronic content, but it's admirable that it has lasted for ten years.

Note: 'chronic' is a talk radio industry term for a caller to a show who goal is to torment hosts by challenging them logically, changing the subject, or up-staging the host. Lionel from WOR in New York is an example of a chronic caller who became a national syndicated show.

L.A.con III, the 1996 Worldcon

I love this L.A.con III home page. This 1996 website, put up by the World Science Fiction Society, is a great example of the trends that were going on at that time. This website had everything: the square icon clip art every website seemed to have, the 'new' icons on every link and the use of links to text (.txt) documents. The inclusion of the text documents enable the reuse of content on websites and in Usenet newsgroups. In the mid 1990's, Usenet newsgroups and BBS were still a primary way for technology focused folks to share information. Note that cassettes were used to for recordings of sessions.

Web Art: The award winning text.jodi.org

In 1999, The Webby committee awarded jodi.org with the best Net Art Webby Award. Jodi was a collaboration between European artists Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans. The website was a surreal mixture of Bit Dumps, HTML, and PC machine code images. This art project was a farewell to the old days of PC's, Atari 5200, and Commadore 64's and preview of the new world of Web Design.

9/11 Remembrance blog: cobwebs

Afterthe 9/11 attacks on the world trade center alot of pages and websites went up to express what many people felt in this country. The eponymously named 'cobwebs.blogspot.com' was probably put up as an expression of grief and anger, but has not been updated since shortly after the attacks.

It's always New Years for Viggo

It's April and it's still New Years on Viggo Chronicles. I spoke to the webmaster and she tells me that they intend to update the web site, but she is new to the job and have quite a lot to learn. This demonstrates the importance of content management and how content can spoil if it's not kept up to date.

Yahoo: Then and Now.

Yahoo! was one of the early index/search sites. It was founded by a pair of students from Stanford, and it was an example of something that was needed at the time. An index of the available websites and the ability to search on content. This Yahoo! site from October 1996 had an early example of user generated content. The 'Add Url' gave users the ability to add new website to this index. The website is clean, there is not alot of content to generate which was an important factor with most of the home users of the internet using modems. If we compare it to what Yahoo! has now, you can see that even the earliest generation had a sense of personalized content (Yahoo! Los Angeles, Japan, San Francisco or Yahooligans!). There was an early shopping site although the early example was pre-advertisement for Yahoo! The Yahoo Internet Life! was a spin off publication for Yahoo!. Finally, it's rare for a company to keep the same icon for 10 years. The red YAHOO! is exactly the same.

Coloradans for Marriage

This is what you get when you put up a website quickly. Although, it's not quite abandoned, it surely is ironic.

Abandoned and orphaned web pages

"cobweb" is a web made up of short irregular strands arranged haphazardly. The strands gather dust and produce the long fluffy streamers you see in barns and old houses. This site is dedicated to websites with abandoned pages, orphaned sites and old web designs.