Recalling the ‘coolness’ of the early Web

Debate flares from time to time about just what the World Wide Web was really like in the mid-1990s, a pivotal time when Internet-awareness became a reality. Is it best thought of as the “Jurassic Web,” as a primitive and mostly empty cyberplace? Or ought we be more charitable and think of the early Web as a frontier of infinite and unfolding possibility?

Cool sites of the mid-1990s (From the Atlantic)

The Atlantic added dimension to that debate yesterday with an intriguing article by Megan Sapnar Ankerson titled, “How coolness defined the World Wide Web of the 1990s.”

If you were not online in the mid-1990s, the article declares, “you might have missed the tremendous effort devoted to curating, sharing, and circulating the coolness of the World Wide Web. The early web was simply teeming with declarations of cool: Cool Sites of the Day, the Night, the…