Take a trip back in time to the hey-day of the dot com boom, while also finding out what became of all the web 1.0 superstars.

Writing in 1995, Clifford Stoll outlines why he sees no future for the internet, quite simply, it’s all too difficult:

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

“When most everyone shouts, few listen.” That much was right.

Via Renai LeMay.

The animated GIF artworks of David Ope: before applications like Flash appeared, creating (quality) animations for the web was a painstaking process, very much like film animation, and involved making up many only slightly different slides that would be then fused together to form a motion image or banner.

Next Monday, 30 November, is International Blue Beanie Day, a day for web professionals to show their support for web standards.

If you’d rather not wear a blue beanie – and this isn’t exactly beanie weather we’re having here – you could always consider adding an illustrated blue beanie to your Facebook or Twitter avatar for the day.

Ten of the most widely used MIDI-format music files from (pre Yahoo era) Geocities websites, courtesy of Jason Scott who had been archiving the now deleted Geocities sites this year.

A sample of nine Geocities webpages which were among the one million archived before Yahoo closed down the old web communities.

Before iPods and Y2K, GeoCities was a quantum leap: The average person could create a web site for free, no questions asked. People took the opportunity and ran with it, building millions of pages – 38 million at last count, according to Yahoo. They helped make the web a more vibrant territory, no longer the citadel of nerds in the know.

And this footnote very much sums up the Geocities experience: “This trip down memory lane includes a pop-up dialog box and some self-starting sound files. That’s the way it was.”

Ten rules and laws of the Internet. If I were to advise people not to believe everything they read or saw online, would anyone believe me?

First recorded in an article by Lori Robertson at FactCheck.org in 2008, this states: “The more exclamation points used in an email (or other posting), the more likely it is a complete lie. This is also true for excessive capital letters.”

I’m pleased to say none of these once all too familiar images (may take a minute or two to load) ever graced any of my websites back in the day.

Six finalists have been shortlisted for this year’s McFarlane Prize with the winner to be announced next week, on 8 October.

If – for some reason – you decided to print out all the data on the internet using an ink jet printer, the task would take about 3,800 years to complete. It would then take you 57,000 years to read – non-stop that is – all of that information.

That’s quite a feat, I’m thinking there might be a better way to spend 57,000 years though.