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August 12, 2005
Old-Skool Web
Slashdot has an Awards link in its navigation area. Fueled by a dangerous mix of boredom and curiosity, today I clicked on it. Instant flashback! The first award shown is on Nov. 26, 1997 when they won the "Project Cool's Cool Sighting award", followed by a mention from USA Today as a "Hot New Site" on Dec. 2, 1997. The last award listed is from April 2000 (just around when the dot-coms imploded).All the Slashdot awards are links, so you can see which sites are still around. Project Cool is long gone, as are Dynamite Site of the Nite, Cool.com's Site of the Day, and WebTrips Rocking Computing Site of the Week; but USA Today still apparently keeps its Hot Site list active, as does the Original Cool Site of the Day.
It's a reminder of how the web started. Remember that Yahoo! began as a list of websites, individually selected and categorized (and it wasn't the only such site; the Y-A in Yahoo! are short for "yet another"). Now you find websites by searching, or by RSS, or ads...but back then people would actually go and poke around and find new sites.
So I started reminiscing about the "good old days", but instead of those, for some reason I remembered the infamous Rob Toups and his Babes on the Web site. Just imagine that; it wasn't just finding cool sites, it was so rare for a woman to have any website at all that Toupsie could actually go around, find all female web sites, link to them, and even rate them on a scale of one to four (by the quality of their HTML, no doubt). As of Feb. 24, 1996 (when I grabbed that link from the Wayback Machine; the original toupsie.com is long gone) there were over 400 women with websites! This is not porn or women with pictures or anything; just any female with a website of any sort. And if you start clicking through the links to the various websites, it's like 1996 all over again.
Posted by AdamBa at August 12, 2005 09:28 PM
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