| February 28, 2005 | Today is tomorrow. It happened. |
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"In some ways, it feels like we have been doing this for as long as we can remember, but in other ways, it feels like we are still at the beginning." --Yahoo! founder David Filo on Yahoo!'s upcoming 10th birthday This Wednesday the company I work for is turning ten years old, and they are throwing a big party for everyone. You are invited too. Well, sort of. Yahoo! will be giving everyone who visits yahoo.com on Wednesday a special free treat. Hint: it's edible, creamy and deelicious. And also hopefully you are not vegan or lactose intolerant. That is the good part. The less good part is that the band they have hired to play for us is Sugar Ray. You may remember Sugar Ray from mid-1990s songs with ear-wormy choruses such as (for the love of God, now is the time to divert your eyes from this web page before these malicious songs get caught in your head!) as "I just wanna fly" and "Every morning there's a halo hanging from the corner of my girlfriend's four-post bed." (And to think that I thought their singer Mark McGrath had retired from the band to become the co-host of "extra". Apparently no such luck!) Before you go thinking that I'm un ungrateful bee-otch, please take note that I am very excited for my company's birthday party. For one thing, there will almost certainly be lots of free beer. For another thing, I am also celebrating my own 10 years of working on the web. While it's true that I don't have very much love stored away for Sugar Ray, perhaps it is just because Yahoo! has set the bar so high with some of their past band choices, such as hiring the flaming lips to play at our holiday party in 2003. This is what yahoo.com looked like in 1995. Even before that (as Esther posted in her blog back in 2002) you might remember visiting Yahoo! circa 1994 before the site was actually located at yahoo.com, back when you got to Yahoo! by typing in "http://www.stanford.edu/~someguysname/html/personal/webdirectory/yahoo or something like that." This is what yahoo.com looked like in 1996. The past 10 years working on the web have kept me experiencing a continuous deja vu. Anyone who has been a web writer, editor or producer since 1995 or 1996 certainly must feel somewhat akin to Bill Murray's character in the 1993 movie "Groundhog Day." For instance, when reading this Christian Science monitor article about Yahoo!'s new media plans in Santa Monica last week, I was struck by the initial thrill about these exciting plans and these exciting times, but a few moments later I had a strong sense of deja vu. Hadn't I already lived in this exciting time? Hadn't I already heard *these* exciting plans? Ah yes, I had. Reading this article brought me back to the spring of 2000, when I worked at Scour.com in Beverly Hills and we had partners like AtomFilms and iFilm and Stephen Spielberg's Dreamworks-backed pop.com was set to launch with an offering of Internet-only programming. This time (five years later) we have seen that the world (well, the U.S. at least) is finally ready for consuming entertainment content on their computers. This time, I am convinced that this stuff can actually be successful. My conviction is so strong that I am leaving San Francisco to move down to Los Angeles again to give it another try. One of my blog posts from March 2000 -- five years ago -- contains links to some of the sites that were virally hot at that time --from JesusDance to Radiskull and Devil Doll and "Superfriends, Whassup." (As an aside, I still say "whassap!" way too much, and my boyfriend has accused my diction of being overly influenced of the internet circa 2000.) Yes, all of your favorites are probably listed, but, be warned, that many of them have *gasp* disappeared from the internet and haven't left a forwarding address. I'm reminded of a sign I saw at Burning Man in 1999. It said "Warning: You are temporary." And you know, if you are an internet website, you are even extra temporary. Before being sued out of existence by the RIAA in late 2000, Scour had planned to morph into a legal for-pay music download service very similar to what Apple is doing quite successfully today with iTunes. JibJab -- whose animated shorts we used to feature on Scour -- now has a promotion deal with Yahoo! and has gotten mentioned on national TV for their "This Land" political short. Speaking of TV, it used to be only short weekly special-interest TV shows (such as CBS-Eyemark's "Wild Wild Web" which Allyson and I worked for in 1998) focused on web-stuff. Now on CNN, and MSNBC, every other word out of many reporters mouths seem to be "blogs" and "the blogsphere." Yeah, the time is right for branded media content on the web. We just really need to get things right this time. I, for one, know that I have learned so much about what works and what doesn't on the web over the past 10 years. And there is a lot that doesn't work. "Convergence" (between the web and TV) was the hot buzz word in 1998 and it's still the hot buzz word. "Blog" was the hot buzz word in 2000 and it's still the hot buzz word. I'm just thankful that no one uses the phrase "Internet Superhighway" anymore. That one was annoying. In February 2002, just before I started working at Yahoo, I wrote to Allyson on our She, Said, She Said blog:
Monthly 'zines? Yeah, done it. In 1996 I was publishing a monthly e-zine, ROAR, for Monster.com in addition to building corporate recruiting sites and hand-coding them in HTML. Community websites? Done that too. In 1997 I was hiring and managing a staff of writers and building CollegeBeat a daily community website for college students (of course, the site's URL is now a porn directory). Luckily, thanks to the Internet Way-Back machine, you can still see the site in all of its former glory and unique web design by moi. For instance, check this out. The design was quite wacky. But alas, that was where I learned all about .ASPs and how to manage writers. Broadband convergence sites? Check. In 1998, as you recall, we were at WildWeb err Getwild.com which looked like this and later like this and they were sending you on tour with John Mellencamp and me to Burning Man 1999 to write articles. Bleeding-edge technology? I was swimming in it. In 1999, I was at Scour (which looked like this minus the broken graphics and then like this) working on peer-to-peer music sharing technology and launching a "technology freedom center" after we got sued by the RIAA and the MPAA. It's like in the past five years, everything's gone so far, so fast that now nothing in the online world even looks remotely interesting to me. What has Poprocks.com looked like over the past 10 years: posted by Jess Barron @ 2:02 PM 
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