I am not one to live in the past or have any regrets. History cannot be changed and regret only rots the promise of tomorrow. In putting together this new Boles Blog to reflect what came before in 14 other instances of thoughts and writing, I came upon the old Awards page for the now retired Go Inside Magazine; and I found great joy in looking back at those wildly created and brightly colored animated .GIFs, and I decided to share them with you here now. I moved the images off the now dead GoInside.com domain and placed them on the live Boles Books domain for serving, but I left the historical, clickable, URLs intact as a compendium of the greatest hits of what was, really, The Original Internet.
Do you recognize any of these websites? Animated .GIFs were big back in the mid-1990’s, and one good way to promote your new website was to “give an award” to another website — there were no blogs back then — and require a link back to your award website. The most elite award we won was from, at the time, the fledgling “Microsoft Network.” MSN was starting with a big bang and a booming promise and it was a Big Deal to get that congratulatory email from Microsoft telling us we were “The One” for a day. That single award from MSFT doubled our readership for the rest of our being.
Here’s what I wrote in Go Inside Magazine on June 20, 1996 concerning what was then, as we know it now, The Golden Age of the Web:
Believe it or not, we are now living in The Golden Age of the World-Wide Web. Enjoy it while you can, for it shall not last long. Especially if the computer industry has its way. They want every noodnik with a modem and a hard drive traipsing around the internet 24 hours a day so they can provide the means for the traipser’s well-being while on the Web. It’ll be a never-ending tourist season of noodniks for us seasoned Webbers as we slay and wheedle away those unwelcomed gawkers armed with cable modems and unlimited Web access for $5 a month.
Time and Tide presses us onward, and we have continued to earn some cool awards, one of them was our “Freshly Pressed” badge for our American Folklore and the Blues Black Cat Bone article published in the former Boles Blues blog — right here on WordPress.com:
I’m all for celebrating a bit of nostalgia — so I added the old Go Inside awards to the new About page for Boles Blogs. I hope you enjoy the rich context of being in publication so long.