The internet has evolved into a somewhat unpleasant beast lately, saturated as it is with cheap porno sites, notorious for breeding sinister cyber criminals who want to steal your very identity, and now plagued with government spies who log our every email and Facebook contact in what has become known as the "database state". And that's without making any mention of the deeply underground worlds of piracy, paedeophiles, and Islamic beheadings. It's become increasingly difficult to find quality, objective, independent information as the big boys dominate the search engines - it seems that no matter what you enter into a search engine you always get Amazon, Wikipedia, or Ebay at the top - and the once gloriously democratic global network has now become the playground of a controlling few. China, Saudi Arabia and other states can ban websites, censor content, and control what people can and cannot see. Large corporations, governments, and criminals have pretty much overtaken the world wide web and made it their own. But it wasn't always like this.
Once, the web was the ultimate expression of "people power", giving amazing freedom to the ordinary man, woman, and child who had a computer and a little bit of basic know-how. Ten years ago the internet was great fun, a bit wild, and totally free of the woeful shackles which now bind it. Google was a mere infant search engine which had no image search, no satellite images or 3D maps, and no sentient artificial intelligence called CADIE capable of almost human thought processes. Ebay was a little hobby site which was rapidly growing, and Amazon was a terrific little book store that had just started selling VHS videos and music. There were no bloggers, no YouTube, no MP3, very few chat rooms, and discussion forums were the exclusive realm of technical nerds who competed with each other for the biggest geek-ego. And a virus was a stupid bit of software designed to cause maximum mischief on Windows 98 rather than steal everything you own including your name.
You could dial-up the internet using a slow (but revolutionary) 56k modem, which consumed your phone line and took an age to download even the smallest JPEG. But nobody cared - this was freedom, a taste of real power for the ordinary individual who now had access to the world of the "information superhighway" and the power to publish without a publisher. It was a wonderful place then, still in its Wild West phase but delightfully simple, accessible, honest, and OURS! The big dot-com crisis hadn't happened yet and the web generated a very real buzz across the world.
And it was during this, what I call the web's golden era, ten years ago in 1999, that a little website was born called DoverWeb. Dover had no web scene back then, although there were a few little websites scattered here and there which were worth a visit. DoverWeb was the start of the local web scene and brought the internet into the local collective consciousness. Towns all over the UK were developing likewise, mainly by enthusiastic hobbyists who did it for love rather than money, and local web scenes grew out of the work of these dedicated pioneers into what they now are.
The world wide web was only five years old when DoverWeb first went live, and it wasn't long before the Boland team leapt on board to make the site commercial (and indeed successful). Web advertising is everywhere these days, built on the backs of multi-million dollar companies who study all the statistics and research all the trends in order to deliver maximum ROI, but back then there were no models to base anything on. DoverWeb and Boland advertising made it all up as they went along. It was never as simple as just sticking a JPEG advert up in the corner - there were statistics to consider, guaranteed hits for every ad, targeting, rotations, dynamic linking, all concepts that were pretty alien to us back then but which are as common as muck these days and taken for granted by anyone who displays web ads.
I feel very proud to have been part of a "movement", part of a generation of people who actually started something historic. I'm not only speaking about DoverWeb here, that would be way too big-headed of me - no, I'm talking about being part of the first wave of groundbreaking websites which ignited a "scene" all over the UK and beyond. Us webmasters (as we were called back then) were dedicated, motivated, inventive, and "onto something". We worked tirelessly to try and shape the web into something good and useful. We fully appreciated that the web was in its infancy and needed individuals who would take the first steps into developing a great network of resources. As individuals we all did our little bit - mine was DoverWeb.
They were great days. Not only for DoverWeb with it's endless parties, brilliant friends, and fun times, but they were great days for the internet as a whole. It does sadden me to see the way the web has developed these days, although it is still a tremendously powerful force of good in the world as plenty of individuals still use it the way it was intended and the way us early designers tried to steer it in our optimistic, idealistic way. I do feel that the special "spark" that the internet had back then is gone, sucked dry by big business, chewed over by governments, and spat out by cyber criminals. DoverWeb's ethic was always based on using, maintaining and promoting the web as a platform of goodwill and freedom. It's perhaps quite a naive view these days but I still hold these values very dearly, and while I still use the web every day of my life, I can't help feeling that I miss it for what it once was.
Anyway I didn't want this year to go past without marking the 10th anniversary of DoverWeb - the website that started it all in Dover - and so I have prepared a little online exhibition which many of you may find nostalgic. I've dusted off some old hard drives and dug out a few digital relics from DoverWeb's history, and you may freely view this material here:
http://www.absolutegraphix.co.uk/doverweb.asp
Happy 10th Birthday DoverWeb!
And long may Dover Forum reign supreme!! :o)
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the little exhibits.