By Mike King
Our last trip into 90s nostalgia got me misty eyed thinking back to more innocent times when the internet was still relatively new and all websites were a novelty to be marvelled at. What fun and excitement we had transitioning from the ‘old’ physical world to the new virtual one, embracing innovation and everything online with boundless enthusiasm.
Even then, it wasn’t long before we all got bored with online brochures that took ages to load and in the early 2000s along came the much touted Web 2.0 revolution, and with it, the new phenomenon called blogging. Blogging was the new, new thing and almost overnight it became an integral part of every company’s communications strategy. Of course, reader numbers for most blogs were tiny, but that didn’t matter, blogging was definitely the thing to be seen doing.
The internet wasn’t as slick back then, access speeds were slow and there wasn’t quite so much care and consideration paid to online strategies. Here are some examples that originate from a time when even such basics as getting a domain name right didn’t seem that important and, in some instances, where the value of a carefully placed hyphen was clearly not appreciated (amusingly these domains are all still in use):
www.therapist.com (first registered in 1995)
www.speedofart.com (first registered in 1998)
www.wtf.org (first registered in 1998)
www.whorepresents.com (first registered in 2003)
Who could ever forget the infamous and, it has to be said slightly suspicious, (and still my personal favourite) www.penisland.net (2002).
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