October 7, 2022

NiemanLab: Way back in 1989, USA Today launched an online sports service. I found it at Goodwill

NiemanLab: Way back in 1989, USA Today launched an online sports service. I found it at Goodwill. “In 2006, one of the most memorably bad ideas to emerge from Bristol, Connecticut came to life in the form of Mobile ESPN, a service that aimed to convince people to sign up for a specialized mobile phone service, at a time when it was hard to imagine subscribing to a mobile company dominated by one brand. At the time, most people already owned a phone, and they weren’t going to shell out extra for one that shouted sports scores at you.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
September 28, 2022

Boing Boing: People are creating huge online archives of GIFs from 90s CD-ROMs

Boing Boing: People are creating huge online archives of GIFs from 90s CD-ROMs. “Tumblr user Gearsphere found this neat CD-Rom of animated GIFs in a thrift store, and uploaded all 22,000 images to a public Google Drive for anyone to download and use. They are gloriously 90s, gloriously 8-bit, and just glorious overall. Not to be outdone, someone else by this act of silly-internet-history kindness, and uploaded their 6-CD-Rom set of animated web clips, too.”

New Resources 0
August 6, 2022

9to5Google: ‘New Google.com’ adds weather, news, and other cards, enters wider testing [U]

9to5Google: ‘New Google.com’ adds weather, news, and other cards, enters wider testing [U]. “The Google homepage has historically been known for providing a clean interface that primarily offers a Search field. Google Search is now testing a row of cards on desktop web for an experience that’s similar to Discover.” Or, if you’re old like I am, similar to the Excite portal back in 1999-2000.

Tweaks & Updates 0
June 5, 2022

WIRED: It’s Time to Bring Back the AIM Away Message

WIRED: It’s Time to Bring Back the AIM Away Message . “I miss Away Messages. This nostalgia is layered in abstraction; I probably miss the newness of the internet of the 1990s, and I also miss just being … away. But this is about Away Messages themselves—the bits of code that constructed Maginot Lines around our availability. An Away Message was a text box full of possibilities, a mini-MySpace profile or a Facebook status update years before either existed. It was also a boundary: An Away Message not only popped up as a response after someone IM’d you, it was wholly visible to that person before they IM’d you. Nothing like this exists in our modern messaging apps.”

Research & Opinion 0
February 21, 2022

Mashable: Remembering Tumblr’s strangest, most formative communities

Mashable: Remembering Tumblr’s strangest, most formative communities. “In the rearview, a singular Tumblr era has taken hold of the cultural consciousness. Known as the 2014 Tumblr Girl aesthetic, the overall vibe involves a devotion to American Apparel, subversive teen series Skins, the black-and-white filter, Lorde, and Matty Healy of The 1975. But there’s so much more to Tumblr, the blogging platform that raised an entire generation of fangirls and artists, than one aesthetic. What about the often forgotten communities on Tumblr that made it such a meaningful platform to so many different people? They might have been written out of public consciousness, but they’ll always be a formative part of our adolescence.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
January 18, 2022

Ars Technica: Hark back to the late 1990s with this re-creation of the dialup Internet experience

Ars Technica: Hark back to the late 1990s with this re-creation of the dialup Internet experience . “We all found our coping strategies for riding out the pandemic in 2020. Biomedical engineer Gough Liu likes to tinker with tech—particularly vintage tech—and decided he’d try to recreate what it was like to connect to the Internet via dialup back in the late 1990s. He recorded the entire process in agonizing real time, dotted with occasional commentary.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
December 13, 2021

Ars Technica: Take one last look at Google Toolbar, which is now dead

Ars Technica: Take one last look at Google Toolbar, which is now dead. “December 11 marked the birthday of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, which Google inexplicably left running nearly 21 years. We say ‘nearly’ because we had this hands-on birthday post written ahead of time, asking, ‘How is this project still running?’, but someone at Google was apparently on the same wavelength. We gave the website one last check before publishing and discovered Google Toolbar is dead. Google shut down the website sometime in the past week, just before its birthday. RIP.”

Tweaks & Updates 0
September 2, 2021

AV Club: We condemn you to Websites From Hell, an archive of the internet’s ugliest websites

New-to-me, from AV Club: We condemn you to Websites From Hell, an archive of the internet’s ugliest websites. “When we think of heinous websites, it’s usually the words and images displayed on them that come to mind and not the visual design, which templates and decades of wisdom have typically managed to keep at a certain quality bar that only the rare examples fail to reach. The internet is vast, though, and keen explorers can still venture out into the wilderness to find garish artifacts from the past or businesses that have continued to update the digital equivalents of an old house’s never-replaced green shag carpet. To ‘honor’ ​these ugliest of online destinations, we have Websites From Hell.”

New Resources 0
August 28, 2021

Mashable: 9 websites that will bring you back to the old internet

Mashable: 9 websites that will bring you back to the old internet. “The internet has been around for long enough — and shifted so drastically in that time — that it’s really easy to get nostalgic for past versions of online life. I mean, remember things like Xanga or the old-school AOL homepage? Those sites are pretty much gone — at least how you knew them. But there remain a few sports for old school online life. That in mind, if you’re ever in the mood for some internet-based nostalgia, we’ve got you covered. We rounded up 9 websites that’ll bring you back to the old internet.”Mashable: 9 websites that will bring you back to the old internet. “The internet has been around for long enough — and shifted so drastically in that time — that it’s really easy to get nostalgic for past versions of online life. I mean, […]

Useful Stuff 0
October 12, 2020

Mashable: What Apple, Google, and Amazon’s websites looked like in 1999

Mashable: What Apple, Google, and Amazon’s websites looked like in 1999. “The year was 1999: Cher’s ‘Believe’ was blasting on pop radio stations, Bill Clinton was impeached, Jar Jar Binks hit the Big Screen, and the beep, beep, static of dial-up internet echoed in family rooms across the globe. The World Wide Web was still young then — gawky, awkward, and painfully slow. The dotcom bubble was still growing, on the cusp of bursting. The public had been using the internet for under a decade and those making online content (before we even called it content en masse) were often just throwing stuff at the wall.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
September 12, 2020

Mashable: Archie, The Very First Search Engine, Was Released 30 Years Ago Today

Mashable: Archie, The Very First Search Engine, Was Released 30 Years Ago Today. “On Archie’s 30th anniversary, we salute the world’s first search engine, a pioneer that paved the way for giants to come. Archie was first released to the general public on Sept. 10, 1990. It was developed as a school project by Alan Emtage at McGill University in Montreal.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
August 16, 2020

CNET: Facebook announces internet nostalgia app E.gg

CNET: Facebook announces internet nostalgia app E.gg. “A weird new Facebook app is launching, and it’s based on bringing back the internet of the ’90s. E.gg is the latest creation from Facebook’s experimental app team New Product Experimentation and is aimed at ‘recapturing that atmosphere’ of the early web.” Because of all the things we left behind, we really need to recapture blinking UNDER CONSTRUCTION gifs and “Punch the Monkey” banner ads.

Tweaks & Updates 0
August 1, 2020

First Look: The Thing BBS (Rhizome)

Rhizome: First Look: The Thing BBS. “Founded by artist Wolfgang Staehle, The Thing made up just a few of the tens of thousands of BBSs that flourished in the years preceding the popularization of the public web, and it fostered a community that sought to experiment with cultural practices via telecommunications networks: writing and publishing, interacting with a community, performing an identity, and distributing art. Immediately preceding the rise of the public web, The Thing was an important forum where early ideas of online art were rehearsed. Despite its historical significance, much of its content has been inaccessible for years. Now, thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New Museum’s digital art affiliate Rhizome has created a contextual archive of messages that were posted to The Thing.”

New Resources 0

The ResearchBuzz Firehose is regular RB content presented as individual posts.
For digest-type posts a couple of times a day, please visit ResearchBuzz.

Want to know how to best use the Firehose for content discovery?
Check out this handy article.

Get RB Firehose Via EMail

Enter your email address to subscribe to ResearchBuzz Firehose and get a firehose of new posts straight to your email.

Join 2,019 other subscribers

Recent Posts

Popular Posts

Latest ResearchBuzz Gizmos