Ghost Sites of the Web

Web 1.0 history, forgotten web celebrities, old web sites, commentary, and news by Steve Baldwin. Published erratically since 1996.

June 20, 2007

Time Magazine Editor to Staff Writers: Write Online or Go Home

An article on Gawker.com summarizes the earnest efforts of Time Magazine Managing Editor Richard Stengel to induce his reluctant, pre-Web staff of writers to write online, and I got a nostalgic chuckle out of it. Way back when I worked for Time Inc., our division was one of a handful of entities in Time Inc's vast fleet of publications that was serving up content daily on the Web, and we were regarded as low-end-of-the-totem-pole geeks by Time's "real" writers, who wrote their copy at a leisurely pace, went home at 5:00 PM, and got very drunk each Friday when the liquor cart appeared on schedule.

We Web geeks, confined to an area of the Time-Life Building that had recently been vacated by Security, worked 12 hour days, earned less, got less respect, and were ultimately terminated when our division was shut down after it was denigrated by Don Logan as a "black hole."

Good luck, Mr. Stengel: you're going to need it. Writing content for this medium is more like operating a chattering Telex machine in a noisy newsroom than it is composing and endlessly rewriting golden sentences, lovingly massaged to blandness, in a well-carpeted skyscraper. Web writers write dispatches, not polished articles. We write for an invisible, often ungrateful audience. We're used to being dissed by "real writers" and aren't even granted proper press credentials.

We're a tough bunch that writes fast, and while we may not always get it right the first time, we know there are no truckloads of paper to recall when we make a mistake. For us, writing is organic and iterative, not a process that etches words in stone or lead. Some people hate the fact that we can do this, and the tone of your memo suggests that you've got your share of such Luddites working for you right now.

I hope that many of your old guard will adapt to this medium, which was new 10 years ago when I worked for Time Inc., but is now the mainstream. And I hope that those who can't or won't will be thrown out the window, just as we were tossed 10 years ago.

The only difference will be that they'll have Golden Parachutes, whereas we fell the full 37 flights flapping our arms in vain.

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Dead Web 1.0 Sites: Were They Really Web 2.0?

I've been reading a sickening amount of bubbly prose about "Web 2.0" recently. What the heck is Web 2.0? Well, Web 2.0 is a bit like pornography: hard to define with any precision but immediately recognizable once you're staring at it.

Despite Web 2.0's self-declared amorphousness, there are some formal criteria: Web 2.0 sites tend to rely on UGC (User-generated content, e.g. updated Bulletin board-style "interactivity"), AJAX, Blogging, Tagging, Social Networking, RSS, Mapping, and a bunch of other stuff that with a high novelty factor but hardly as revolutionary as the good old Web 1.0-era hyperlink. Oh - I almost forgot: "rounded corners." Just about every Web 2.0 site has a design incorporating "rounded corners," and I guess a lot of people this design flourish is fresh, but has it occured to anyone that TheGlobe.com sported rounded corners almost 10 years ago?

I don't know who invented the term "Web 2.0," but he or she is a marketing genius. Rebranding the Web in this way does two things: first, it distances today's entreprenurial class from the disaster of Web 1.0, which is already a fleeting memory for many now working in this business. Secondly, it suggests that there's something radically new about the way technology, capital, and hype are now intersecting (there isn't). The structural difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is the way these Web properties (most of which will fail) are being financed. In Web 1.0, the money was stolen from investors in the public market through the mechanism of the IPO. Today, the scam has gone corporate, and instead of fleecing Mom & Pa's 401K, today's entreprenuers are fleecing old-line media companies and ad agency holding companies, who are paying obscene amounts of money for properties which will probably collapse like balloons within 24 months.

So yes, I'm a skeptic. I think that that Web 1.0/Web 2.0 dichotomy is pure marketing bullshit. Marketing people have infested the technology business to a completely unacceptable degree, and this is their handiwork. (I know this because I'm a marketing person myself, not by choice, but because nothing else I've tried pays the bills).

Anyway, here are a few Web properties that died long before Web 2.0 was born. In many ways, they were much more innovative than today's garden variety bookmark-photo-sharing-social-networking-with-AJAX Web 2.0 monstrosity.

EMarker.com
http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/show_exhibit/emarker2
You hear a great song on the radio. You grab your EMarker ("The Gotta Have it Gadget"), push a button, plug it into your PC and whammo - you've bought it. And unlike iTunes, your PC isn't brought to a standstill by Apple's bloatware music store. I like it!

eMemories.com
http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/show_exhibit/ememories
Long before Flickr, eMemories pioneered photo-sharing on the Web. In a parallel universe somewhere, it's the one getting all the accolades, whereas Flickr languishes in obscurity.

MySpace.com
http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/show_exhibit/freediskspace
Few know that Myspace.com wasn't always a place for Friends: it was a place for free file-sharing, and it failed miserably back in 2000.

Go.com
http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/show_exhibit/go
Disney's search engine could have been the next Google. But the mousketeers failed to imagineer themselves beyond mediocrity, and gave up before the battle had even begun.

GatherRound.com
http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/show_exhibit/gatherround1
Another photo-sharing site that could have been the next Flickr.

Beenz.com and Flooz.com
http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/mef/beenz.shtml
http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/show_exhibit/flooz1
Wow - do you mean that the Web could have its own currency that has nothing to do with what Alan Greenspan or Ben Barnanke does with interest rates? That sounds Web 2.0-like to me!

Mr. Swap
http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/show_exhibit/mrswap1
This site, which encouraged users to swap their old junk for pennies, was way ahead of its time. I hear that another Silicon Valley startup calle LaLa.com has a very similar idea, and is now running with it with millions in funding. The more things change, they more they stay the same (but of course, everything will work out much better this time around)!

Pseudo.com
http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/show_exhibit/pseudo1
Video is hot, hot hot, and Madison Avenue is plunking millions into video ads, and that's why Google, Yahoo, iTunes and YouTube are all battling for video views. How Web 2.0! Wait a minute, are you telling me that Pseudo.com did this very same thing years and years ago, and that nobody gave a damn? Yup.

I'll be revisiting some of the entries in the Museum of Electronic Failure from time to time, especially those which have a high Web 2.0 quotient. Please stop by again.

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Ghosts of New York's Silicon Alley Live on at Silicon Alley Station

Silicon Alley Station Has Not Been Updated in Almost Three Years
Silicon Alley Station, an independent Web-based radio network whose beat was New York's technology sector, has not updated its content in almost three years.

This is sad, because SAS, in its day, provided high-quality, hype-free coverage of technology developments in New York in an appealing, free format that generally bettered the efforts of the deep-pocketed mainstream media. To my knowledge, no one is about to enter the vacuum left behind by SAS; a sure sign that as far as the Internet Rapture is concerned, New York is a city "left behind." Clicking through the SAS site is a surreal experience: a bit like discovering a long-buried railroad terminal with Pullman cars still on the tracks, waiting for passengers that will never arrive.

SAS and New York's technology scene might be dead, but the site's streaming audio archives live on, although it's likely only a matter of time before they too become inaccessible. Highlights include interviews with many former luminaries of New York's late 1990's technology scene, making it a virtual time capsule of Gotham City's high hopes, world-dominating dreams, and wackily star-crossed illusions of the late 1990's.

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