Saturday, December 31, 2005

Metaphorically producing a partial vacuum online Back before the word "weblog" was around, there were a few websites that were updated daily, had a fresh personality, and commented on life, the Internet and everything... which I'd accept as a definition of "blog" today. Another four-letter word, loosely defined in my title above, provided the name for the site... and my reason for not mentioning the name and linking to it now is today's bad news. (But there's a happy ending. Read on.) That pre-blog "webzine" was colorful, smart, independent, outrageous and usually very funny. Think of it as an online "Daily Show" for 1995, staffed by a team of satirists who usually hit their targets like shooting fish in a barrel. In fact, the site's motto was, "A fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun." When I was a doctoral student building Web resource pages for one of the first journalism school Internet 101 courses, I always linked to that site and showed it in class as a prime example of new ideas about publishing online... usually with a caveat to freshmen that the site was "adult" and sometiimes offensive in vocabulary, images and topics. (Only once did I scroll down a page on the classroom's big screen and inadvertently display something anatomically correct, but painfully pierced. Luckily, the freshmen weren't looking.) I recall only one (older) student taking offense at the site's four-letter name, a verb he thought was already too big a part of students' vocabularies. But the word describes (among other things) the valuable action of a sump pump -- in this case, draining the Web of stagnant thinking and overflowing metaphors (like this one). The authors also went after old media that just didn't "get" the Internet, including The New York Times and the AP. (Of course big media are more enlightened now, ten years later, especially with all these bloggers looking over their online shoulders.) In October 1995, the site in question not only provided creative advice about blocking Web advertising, but also explained how to do the same with Wired magazine, where (if my memory is correct) some of the creators had their day jobs. I was impressed that the proprietors of that August 1995 site had snagged the domain name before some cheap porn-peddler did, along with most other four-letter verbs. Sadly, the owners of the name appear to have recently let it slip into the hands of just that kind of operation... which is why I haven't mentioned or linked to the name yet. Ever since the sad day in June 2001 when daily publication ceased (after a couple of online publishing mergers), the site's owners kept the address working, making all of the original content available. When word started spreading about its second demise yesterday, fans who had saved all of its pages quickly announced various redistribution techniques including a full mirror -- at least until some copyright-holder comes up with an alternative solution. PS I should get some classroom use out of this page when we discuss euphemism, as well as online property rights. Footnote: I just went back to re-read Andy Baio's Waxy alert item and noticed this link to a detailed feature story at keepgoing.org giving the history of the original suck.com, calling it "the first great website." 12:25:17 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2008 Bob Stepno. Last update: 7/19/08; 1:11:05 PM.