On Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:56:35 -0400 marius schebella marius.schebella@gmail.com wrote:
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Here's how I remember it Marius. The term "webring" was in use circa 1995, in the "preteen adolescence" of the internet if you like. There were thousands of webrings on all subjects from absailing to ZX81 games. They came at a time when commodity hosting first rolled out and everybody started to have a website on Geocities and suchlike. While not as popular as BBS, forums, IRC or any of the other giant internet and pre-web phenomenon, webrings were of a scale that makes the term a generally understood public domain expression through common usage. They were a formative version of the social networking concept by direct association between sites. Any ideas on who coined the term? I guess you could possibly find references going back to 94 somewhere and pinpoint a first usage in the archives.
Fast forward to about 2000. I'm searching for webrings on game modding about that time and seeing that one company had spamdexed the entire Google listings down past page 10 with individual entries, many of which were placeholders and didn't actually seem to exist. Their SEO tactics were so brutal you had to jump to pages in the low teens before you saw any of the old independent webrings. It seems since registering the domain in 1997 they've systematically been swallowing up private webrings and trying to shut down all the others for the last 10 years.
Anyone got any stories or evidence that supports this view?
a.