The Good Web Site Guide 2005... How things Have Changed...

I dropped by my local garden centre a few days ago, to pick up some seeds, and on the way out I perused a charity bookshelf they had in the foyer.

I just couldn't resist this:

The Good Web Site Guide 2005....

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I mean, the fact that here we have a BOOK of Websites is enough to demonstrate how DIFFERENT things were almost 20 years ago in 2005.

If you look inside the front cover this thing had sold 250K copies, so it was pretty popular.

Presumably people referred to it and typed in the URLs.... unless they were familiar with going to one the search engine of their choice such as www.google.co.uk, Ask Jeeves, or Mamma.com....

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ASK JEEVES, Oh my dayz!

And Mama.com looks like it's seen better days too, it's now just offering a browser attachment to enhance information about sites you use.

The online job market looked very different....

The directory here is basically just limited to careers advice and job searching...

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This is one of the main transformations I guess in the last 20 years (well, one of many) where you know upload your C.V. and there are full-on virtual matching services!

Or if they wanted books

There was this oddly named site called Amazon...

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A max fun trip back in time...

It's funny going back to 2005, a time when online life hadn't become an all-in - it's like people actually mainly had offline lives and OCCASIONALLY dipped into the net for selected reasons.

Compare that to today when everything's integrated and many more people are living their lives MAINLY online.

Not sure it's better now, and I'm getting nostalgic for ye olden dayz.

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12 comments
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Thanks for sharing it, can I found it on Google?

Or can you share the whole book with me?

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The titles just on the cover - not sure if the whole thing is on Google!

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I remember buying a similar book at the end of the 20th century, in 1998. Although I used search sites of that time.

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Amazing, isn't it? I'd been online since 1998 running message boards, forums and communities and by 2005 I was working with De Montfort University as a facilitator engaging freelancers, small businesses and voluntary organisations and introducing them into the web world and going off to Geneva for international conferences about the influence of technology. By 2009, I was the second cohort at the University of Leicester doing a Master's in digital media and society. Some of things we covered then are just being realised, it was a real future forward course. I remember those days of 5,000 websites - my tiny independent bookshop and live literature venue was able to climb the ranks of Alexa.com without any trouble. I don't think we would be able to do that these days.

I remember talking to a friend a couple of years ago and they were saying how do you remember when we first got search engines we'd put in a search term like "Elvis Presley" (and be thrilled at the results) and by the year we were talking (can't remember exactly when it was), you could put in a search term like "what was elvis wearing the day he died" and get the full SP.

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I didn't know you were so far ahead of the game! All of this does inspire me to spend more time offline mind!

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I remember the early days of the web. It was a very different place. Bank then I was on a slow modem. Now you download megabytes for each page. I wonder how long the book stayed current.

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They were updated yearly! Nowadays we freakout if we have to wait two seconds!

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mhmm! shout out to the good old simple days . This just shows that before one learns to run you must first off all have mastered walking.

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