"I'm shocked - shooked! - that the Web existed before 2000!"

Okay, this columnist, Farhad Manjoo, at Slate is officially driving me nuts. He seems clueless about technology and the Web. But, he gets paid to write a column at Slate. After tackling online college lectures (an emerging phenom a year or two ago), why satellite radio sucks, and why Microsoft should copy the Apple Store in recent columns, he turns to history.

Today's piece is about the state of the Web, circa 1996. He got the inspiration for the piece by noting that someone asked him what it was like to browse the web way back when.

So, he does some research in the Internet Archives and old editions of "Time" magazine and comes to the conclusion that people could read Slate, look at the weather, and play the Kevin Bacon Game. In other words, there wasn't diddly squat there.

I beg to differ.

The Web, in many ways, was quite interesting in those early days. Of course, Manjoo just talks about the commercial Web, ignoring the many websites of academics, artists and individuals that were the backbone of the Internet we know and love today.

He seems amazed that people were "blogging" before 1999, when the term came into existence. No doubt he would be surprised that people were actually creating their own content for the Web before Web 2.0, YouTube, blogs, wikis and all the rest of it.

Sigh. It's columns like this that make me browse to Slate less and less.

article at Slate

Something Awful or Something Creepy?

The site somethingawful.com is running a strange little series. The site, in general, is devoted to humor pieces that make fun of memes or other such nonsense on the Web. (For example, take a gander at their recent "Celebrity Stalker" column.)

These things are just, well, creepy.

It's similar to another series they ran, which seemed to take place in another parallel universe, called "Instructions for a THing".

This one's called "That Insidious Beast" and each entry is a piece of something - a web site, a series of personal journal entries, a blog, etc - from some type of universe parallel to our own with a totalitarian state that's gone right-wing crazy. Here's the different parts of the series:

Magnum PI
TV Infodot Mixups
Televised Broadcast Schedule
Holy Hand Broadcasting
A Great Haul
Active Area
Ghosts of Brier Hill
Counter-Programming
Field Dominance
Screen Burn

If you want to dive in, the best places to start, at least for me, are TV Infodot Mixups, Ghosts of Brier Hill and Field Dominance.

Make your own fabric

I'm probably late on this, but there's a site out there that lets you create your own fabric.

Just send them a design and they'll print it for you for $18 a yard, no minimum order.

There's one graphic designer that sells custom cloth designs printed at the site here.

http://www.spoonflower.com/

Lawyers ... bah!

Slate has an article about an absolutely nutty court case.

A law firm, consisting of idiots who don't understand how links work, sued a real estate company for linking to bios of lawyers on their site in recent real estate buy listings, which are open and public.

Seems the law firm thinks that linking violates their trademark - that consumers would be confused, thinking that the real estate site was part of the law firm. The real estate site, a small start-up with not much cash, had to cave and settle the case with these sleezeballs, who are basically trying to control access to public information that they don't like being public.

I would like to make quite clear that this site (or me personally) have nothing to do with these high-priced ambulance-chasing opportunists. I hope you'll join me in placing links to these ridiculously Internet-retarded individuals on your own blog.

article at Slate

On the Internet, no one knows....

you're a goat.