Ten Years of Web-ification

Ten Years of Web-ification

Today is the tenth anniversary of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch online, according to their own article.

I might point out the St. Louis Community Information Network website appeared first several months earlier, in August 1995. At that point, it was a section of the St. Louis Home Page hosted by WashU.

Arguably, the Post-Dispatch web presence has changed more over the years than St. Louis CIN has. The P-D moved through several different incarnations and business models, even creating StLToday.com as a separate business for a while, in a (rather lame) attempt to capitalize on the Internet bubble. In the process, they abandoned the "PostNet Communities" websites they had made available for small community groups to develop using Koz tools.

Meanwhile, the CIN home page still looks a lot like it has since May 2000. Although, starting around May 2001, I started to make my mark on the CIN home page by constantly updating the links with various community events and special information links. Later, in October 2001, the first version of the CSB online complaint filing system, on which I worked extensively, was unveiled.

A little later, Chris Dornfeld made his mark on the CIN home page, in the form of a patriotic new banner header unveiled on November 7, 2001 (my 23rd birthday), and about two years later, in December 2003, with his version of a "high-tech" banner header which is still on the site.

A few months after that, Dornfeld left to take his current position, which also happens to be at WashU.

Anyway, the politics and the business of the World Wide Web have changed a lot over the past ten years. I still think it has enormous potential, perhaps not for making a quick buck as so many people hoped for themselves, but at least in creating and redefining our collective sense of community.