It’s strange to think that my professional life has been focused on Internet issues for about three years longer than Google has been around. I often tell people that I’ve been working online since Prodigy was The Next Big Thing; I may amend that to incorporate a pre-Google perspective. After all, how many people actually remember Prodigy?

Anyway, today being Google’s 12th birthday, I decided to take a look back at the 1998 version of the Internet. (By the way, that’s the New York Times home page up there, circa 1998.)

I found a Pew commentary titled The Internet Circa 1998.Back then, “57% of non-internet users said they worry ‘not at all’ about missing out on something by not going online. 22% of non-users said they worry ‘not very much,’ 10% worry ‘a fair amount,’ and 7% worry ‘a great deal’ about missing out on something by not going online.”

This page of predictions for the Internet in 1998 from Jakob Nielsen included the observation that “the Web is simply not that suited for advertising” — which, of course, hasn’t stopped advertisers one bit.

And here’s a place where you’ll find results of a survey focused on “the scholarly uses of the Internet. Among the survey’s conclusions:

The three most popular professional uses of the Internet revolve around sending and receiving electronic mail (individual and list-mediated), and reading online news.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 27th, 2010 at 9:28 am and is filed under Internet Stuff.