web 1.0

In the mood for some deep thinking about Web 2.0?  Check out Venkatesh Rao's article, The Last Page of Web 2.0.

Remember the last page of the Internet? That was a joke that worked on many levels.  We all know how the Web 1.0 story really ended and where the real last page was. We discovered in the minimalist Google homepage that search, rather than content, was the real star of Web 1.0. That search could reconstruct advertising around clicks rather than impressions. The main Google homepage was the real last page of Web 1.0, as I’ll explain. By definition, it was also the first page of Web 2.0. The trajectory of Web 2.0 has now run through a similar course. While no worthy joke page has emerged, it is now clear what the real last page of Web 2.0 is. Take your best guess before you read further.

In keeping with tradition, the following are seven articles that were posted here at CMSReport.com and received less attention than I had hoped.  Either the reader didn't show up to view the article or there was little discussion on the subject matter.  I'll let you be the judge on whether these articles deserved the obscurity they received in 2008.

1. Walt Mossberg on the Asus Eee PC
2. The Content in 1996
3. Revealing numbers from Alfresco regarding the enterprise stack
4. Are there not enough girl geeks in the world?
5. U.S. Falling Behind as Academics Goes Global
6. The case for a boxed CMS: Security
7. Is Microsoft finally seeing the light with Office?

Gadgetopia pointed their readers to a site with a number of screen captures for how the Internet looked like in 1996. Almost a year ago, I posted a screen capture of the first site I did in that era. I'm somewhat pleased that the appearance of my site was no worse than the sites of well known companies. The author brings up the point that you have to consider the technology back then to why sites looked the way they did.

In their defense, the technology was different in 1996. Although Internet Explorer 3.0 could run Java applets and inline media, Netscape Navigator could not, and in any case nobody felt comfortable doing anything more complicated than making a few animated GIFs.

Most people who were quite active on the Internet in the 1990's shouldn't be surprised with the way the Internet looked back then. I can easily recall the controversy of whether to design sites for 640x480 or 800x600 screens. We were simply limited in how we designed our sites by the technology we were using. However, what was our excuse for not providing better content than what we did?

While most bloggers are using the new year to look ahead, I am not quite ready to make promises to the year of 2007. In fact, I am more inclined to looking at the past thanks to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

I'd like to challenge anyone who has designed a web page to find the oldest site in the archive that they authored and post the Wayback Machine link in the comment section of this post. There are no prizes being awarded in this "contest" but I promise you can have some space for bragging rights. Feel free to include any history on the page that you feel is necessary to tell your story.

The archive contains archived web pages from 1996 to the near present. The oldest web pages I could find that I authored was from 1997 for the National Weather Service's forecast office in Sioux Falls, SD.

The above site actually originated in March 1996, but this 1997 image is the earliest I could find in the archive. Not very impressive is it? However, you have to remember that I was authoring with HTML 1.x and worried that Netscape's introduction of the blink element was pushing the envelope further than I wanted to go.