Farhad Manjoo at Slate has a rather weird post up on the Internet circa 1996. I say weird because he makes conclusions about the internet at that time based on what we expect from the web today, with the following conclusions:

I started thinking about the Web of yesteryear after I got an e-mail from an idly curious Slate colleague: What did people do online back when Slate launched, he wondered? After plunging into the Internet Archive and talking to several people who were watching the Web closely back then, I’ve got an answer: not very much.

and more

We all know that the Internet has changed radically since the ’90s, but there’s something dizzying about going back to look at how people spent their time 13 years ago. Sifting through old Web pages today is a bit like playing video games from the 1970s; the fun is in considering how awesome people thought they were, despite all that was missing.

Notably he also links to archived pages at The Internet Archive, despite the fact modern browsers don’t render them correctly (Yahoo didn’t look like this in Mosaic or Netscape 1), but I digress.

People still refer to the new medium by its full name?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùthe World Wide Web?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùand although you sometimes find interesting stuff here, you’re constantly struck by how little there is to do. You rarely linger on the Web; your computer takes about 30 seconds to load each page, and, hey, you’re paying for the Internet by the hour. Plus, you’re tying up the phone line. Ten minutes after you log in, you shut down your modem. You’ve got other things to do?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùafter all, a new episode of Seinfeld is on.

Now my memory of the time may be dulled by age, but it wasn’t quite like this.

Sure, you paid by the hour, and it was as expensive as hell. I think at first I was paying something like $50/ mth for 6-8 hours,then $5 an hour over that, and I use to get these horrible excess use bills. Yes, it was slow on my 14.4k modem I paid $500 for at Grace Bros (now Myer) in 96. I went back to Uni briefly in 96 as well, so I had free access on campus as well, which helped.

But to suggest that there was nothing to do on the web in 96 is disingenuous.

In fact, with maybe the exception of Wikipedia today, I actually read more widely in 96 than I do today, despite hundreds of millions of extra sites to pick from.

There wasn’t as much, but compared to before it was more than enough.

The marvel of reading a foreign newspaper online like the NY Times might be taken for granted today, but in 96 it was a miracle of the digital age.

The front page of Yahoo acted as a portal to information that went beyond the local library into areas you simply would never have known about or had access to.

Discovery of interesting content was half the fun, even if perhaps it didn’t share the purpose driven goals of today.

Sure, what video there was usually appeared in a very small portion of the screen and took a decent time to play, but there was multimedia.

Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com was founded in 1995. I remember vividly listening in (I believe on broadcast.com, but I could be wrong) to New York Police Scanners and Air traffic control in Houston, Texas. Would that enthrall people today? Probably not, but in 96 this idea you could listen to police attending callouts on the other side of the planet in real time was radical, and simply amazing.

There was plenty of other things to do as well. Manjoo points out that during this time Geocities started to become popular. I don’t recall when I set up my Geocities account, might have been 97, but I set up my first site in 96 on my ISP account, the first branch of a political party in Australia online I might add. In 96 I taught myself the basics of html, used hotdog along the way, and actually created something that others outside my own small world could see.

The Internet at this stage started to change the world as we knew it. It wasn’t boring in any shape or form given the standards of the time. If we were to time travel back: yes, the web may have been boring by todays standards, but students of history know better than to judge history strictly by modern eyes.

To start on a positive note, I’ve had a uptick lately of Australian PR pitches. Some are half reasonable, although like all the stuff that comes in, we can’t run it all, even if we wanted to. The Inquisitr doesn’t do a huge amount of Australian related content, although as our Australian traffic increases it does get a little tempting to do more Australian posts…within moderation of the broader mix.

But I digress. Got pitched last month to promote a new Australian banking product. They wanted to give me a $10 account in return for a post.

Now besides the paid for post argument which can be left for another day, apparently $10 in the eyes of that PR firm at least is fair game for a blog with 1.5-2.5 million page views a month.

It’s hard to compare one site to another, but I know from some of the media I’ve received previously that WAToday, the Fairfax WA portal did 341,000 uniques in July 2008 (I don’t have later figures). No idea what their page view figure is, but today we’re in a similar range on Alexa at least (not the best source I know) to what that site is doing, and we have more uniques.

Question is: would the same PR agency offer $10 for a post/ article on a Fairfax property?

Obviously the answer is no, and one would presume that they’d be buying display advertising for the product instead of trying to buy a post….well, you’d hope so.

So why treat all blogs and bloggers as if they were backyard operations with small traffic?

Besides, according to News.com.au, I personally account for 5-6% of all online contracting for the entire country 😉

American PR reps are a lot smarter these days, although I do remember the time years ago when they weren’t. Not all the Australian PR industry is clueless, but I get this feeling that some have only just woken up to blogs as an outlet for news, and are treating bloggers as a cheap way to get exposure without showing the least bit of respect.

Paidcontent reports on a PCW report that suggests at least until the end of the last year, online ad spend in Australia continued to head north.

Notably off a crappy base, and they only polled the “top 1000 sites” what ever that means. Still, wins a win.

I’ll admit it: I’m a tab fiend. I switched away from IE6 to Firefox all those years ago (when I was still a Windows user) for tabs. Tabs were, and still are the miracle of the modern internet. They allow you to open content and come back to it later.

In my case, that’s opening content in Google Reader that I might want to read in full later, or even post about. On a busy day, that can be as high as 40-50 tabs…which is also why I do my reading in Safari today, even if I do my posting and stats work in Firefox, Safari is more stable.

But I digress. The problem I have today is with audio. Sometimes I’ll open a tab (and they’re opened in the background, not upfront) and it will play music. Sometimes which ones are obvious, for example with auto-playing video. But many other times it’s not so obvious, and if you have dozens of tabs open, it’s hard to identify where the audio is coming from, if you can at all.

Numerous times lately I’ve just had to turn off sound because I couldn’t find the source, which is where browser makers come in. Please, please add a tab, or icon, or something to identify the source of audio on webpages. It’s all I ask, honestly (well aside from FF stability).