[PD] webring name and url (!) changed to pd_ring

[Andy Farnell]

On Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:56:35 -0400
marius schebella <marius.schebella at gmail.com> wrote:

> a. Use

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.

-- 
Use the source