Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
This morning, I briefly turned my retro frames-based theme back on, long enough to take snapshots of the web sites of the various folk who left comments on the 1997 related posts. I’ve linked these at the bottom of this post. If you want to add your site to the gallery, or if I accidentally left yours off, leave a note.
The purpose of yesterday’s demonstration of Old is New Again was to have fun, but there was a point to it, too. This week we’re seeing a significant backlash against the hype of “Web 2.0″–not because we’re sneering at all the Beautiful People; but because we’ve been through this before, and we know what’s going to follow. Frankly, we’re a little peeved that people think we’re so daft as to forget what happened just a few short years ago.
Scott Rosenberg remembers, when he responded to Tim O’Reilly’s expressions of conference about a ‘hype cycle’:
I do not know what will come of this not-so-holy union, but from the feel of things at the Hotel Argent today, it seems likely that a certain number of people will get rich, a certain amount of money will be wasted, several important new companies and technologies will emerge and some indeterminate number of investors will be fleeced. So that means it’s probably too late, John and Tim — the hype-cycle wheel is already in spin, up, up, up.
For all that Web 2.0 is supposed to be about the tech, we’re seeing little new tech, and a whole lot of spin.
Returning a moment to my little frame-based web page: Frames are rarely used anymore, as web page purists having condemned them as Evil. I haven’t forgotten when they proliferated, and how they were (and still are) abused. A quick peek at about.com demonstrates how frames can, and are abused (frames, graphics, links, writers–you name it, and about.com will abuse it).
Yet for all of their abuse, they’re a nice little bit of technology. Comparing old and new, the whole concept of AJAX is so that people can make edits and refresh content ‘in place’–without having to re-load the entire web page. Frames also enabled continuity at a site, smoothing the flow of navigation. Where the two primarily differ in concept is that AJAX is restricted to accessing data local to the page of reference. Oh, and AJAX has a press agent.
To return to technology–because for all my tut tutting, I love to putter– here’s my first Ning application. I was rather amazed to see two responses already this morning. I guess I’ll have to clean it up since company is visiting.