*As the early web dies crushed beneath a stampede of broadband social media...
http://contemporary-home-computing.org/vernacular-web-2/
(...)
"So, here’s the question: how does the Web look now, when it’s no longer seen as the technology of the future, when it’s intertwined with our daily lives and filled by people who are not excited by the mere fact of its existence?
"At a first glance, this question looks like a purely aesthetic one. One might think it’s almost unimportant. But in fact, nothing demonstrates the state of the Web in general and the state of its services, in particular the ones that follow the Web 2.0 ideology, as clearly as the style and look of ordinary users’ home pages.
"Garden Gnomes
"I guess I took it a bit too far when I called them “home pages”. Home pages no longer exist. Instead, there are other genres: accounts, profiles, journals, personal spaces, channels, blogs and homes. I’d like to pay special attention to the latter ones.
"Professional web developers and designers scorned home pages (namely, personal home pages) starting from the mid-90’s. In an 1998 interview to W3J, Tim Berners-Lee formulated his attitude to private home pages:
“They may call it a home page, but it’s more like the gnome in somebody’s front yard than the home itself.”
"Pioneer of Russian web designer, Artemi Lebedev, included home pages and their creators in his hate list, next to boiled onions and the Caps Lock key.
"Two years ago, the Dutch interaction designer Hayo Wagenaar, with whom I shared a panel at the Decade of Webdesign conference, flung a remark:
“The question is, what do we think of amateurs getting involved in web design? It feels like getting stuck on the highway behind a caravan.”
"Little by little, home pages became the lowest possible lifeform on the Web – it became terminally uncool, and in the end, useless to have one. ..."
