I got so much of a kick out of taking a trip back into the past and visiting early incarnations of old tech properties that I decided to repeat the experiment, but this time using blogs as fodder. So, pack your bags, hop into the nearest DeLorean and lets go back in time to see how some of the web’s most popular neo-media publications began.


Ars Technica

Circa April 22nd, 1999


The granddaddy of what would become one of the more well respected blogs in the ’sphere once looked kind of like a Geocities site. The most interesting take away from this image is the substantially more casual style of “reporting”. This site is from a time well before we started taking ourselves so seriously.

[Ars Technica]


Engadget

Circa March 5th, 2004


Even back in 2004, Engadget still wrote way, way too many posts a day for any normal person to keep up with. It wasn’t the 20-30 they do these days, but they weren’t exactly slacking either. Interesting theme to take note of — you’ll notice that a lot of these sites started off as two column affairs before migrating towards the more sponsorship friendly three-column model.

[Engadget]


Gizmodo

Circa August 24th, 2002


There is something beautifully utilitarian about Gizmodo’s old design. There is a part of me that would miss the glitz and glamor that Gawker’s injected, but this version is certainly easier on the load times. Oh yea and notice the advertising model, hawking Amazon products through an affiliate link. This was before Adsense was quite what it is.

[Gizmodo]

Here’s a bonus for showing up.

[Gizmodo Parked]


Lifehacker

Circa February 3rd, 2005


Fun fact, the first iteration of Lifehacker was sponsored by Sony. There is a lot less to look at in this version of the site and the content’s presentation is a bit — bland, but once again it gets high marks for utility. Interestingly, if you check the sidebar you can get a glimpse at some Gawkers Media properties that have since sunk into the Deadpool.

[Lifehacker]


Mashable

Circa July 30th, 2005


I think Mashable wins the award for the largest change between then and now. Lets not even take into account the social network that they built on top of the blog, but you’ll notice that this version of Mashable has an entirely different tagline, “The latest trends. Cool hunting. The future. Fast news for early-adopters.” and is using what looks like the default Wordpress theme. I don’t know what the deal was with the “*”, but I am glad it’s gone.

[Mashable]


Read/Write Web

Circa August 8th, 2003


This is from back when RWW was basically a one man show. What you’ll notice is that Richard still manages to produce some first-rate analysis of the topics of the day. Another interesting
talking point is, “What is Userland?” Apparently they design web publishing solutions. Back in 2003, Wordpress and Movable Type hadn’t yet solidified their strangle hold on the web publishing market.

[Read/Write Web]


Techcrunch

Circa July 10th, 2005


One note — this is not the first incarnation of Techcrunch. The earlier one just doesn’t render very well anymore. I love this design by the way, it is the best of the bunch. Interesting things about the early days of Techcrunch? Mike really stuck to the format in the early days. It made for a more informative but vastly less entertaining read.

[Techcrunch]


Web 2.0 Roundup

I was looking for the first, cringe-worthy version of How To Split An Atom to show you all but I couldn’t find one that would still render. Instead, I decided to pull from the archives and show you the equally cringe-worthy first post. Enjoy.

From Odeo

For everyone who loves to listen to the diggnation podcast, this is for you. If you have been keeping up on the latest podcast, Kevin Rose and Alex were talking about making a browser for Alex Albrecht and how ironic it would be if it was made only for OSX (he is notoriously ‘anti-apple’). “StephenClreland” of digg made it happen. It is available here until he runs out of bandwidth.

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