1995

Yahoo! appears

In 1995 Yahoo! Search launched allowing visitors to search their directory. It was the first popular online directory and search engine on the World Wide Web.

Yahoo! was apparently named because the founders like the word, although the often cited Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle sounds more fun.

Yahoo! later developed a web portal, competing with Excite, Lycos, and our old friend America Online. Wikipedia states that by 1998 Yahoo! was the most popular starting point for web users, and the human-edited Yahoo! Directory the most popular search engine, receiving 95 million page views per day.

1998

Google

It is strange to think back to the time before 1998 when Google did not exist. Prior to Google we variously used Yahoo!, Lycos, Altavista and Ask Jeeves.

So how did Google fare?

Well apparently at the time of writing it is the world's dominant search engine with 91.54% of the global search engine market. According to Semrush* in January 2024 there were 5.9 million Google searches per minute.

For background, there are now over 1 billion websites in the world, although only 18% of these are active. The World Wide Web Size Project** estimates the number of webpages indexed in Google is about 50 billion - compared to the 25 million shown below in 1998.

* Semrush is an online marketing company.

** The World Wide Web Size Project is part of a Master thesis project at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

2000

Friends Reunited official launch

Wikipedia states that this was conceived by Julie and Steve Pankhurst and their friend Jason Porter in 1999. Julie's curiosity about the status of old school friends inspired her to develop the website.

Friends Reunited was officially launched in June 2000. By the end of the year it had 3,000 members, and a year later this had increased to 2.5 million.

What Wikipedia doesn't say is that Friends Reunited helped me regain contact with school friends Dave and George after a gap of almost 20 years. Thanks Julie!

West Malling website

We moved into the Kings Hill development at West Malling in 1994 and stayed until my retirement in 2008.

At that time there was no website dedicated to the town of West Malling, and I decided to set one up. There were no social media sites in the form we see today and Google was in its infancy.

The original idea was that the site would be useful for potential visitors and also a reference point for residents. A great deal of time was spent listing all the local businesses, taking photographs and researching local history.

In those days local websites would typically be found through index sites, such as Villages Online, and visibility was best achieved by incorporating as many mutual links as possible. Hence another focus was emailing local businesses and getting their support.

Interestingly I was asked by one business how I had managed to find them, my answer being ″I use Copernic, which effectively runs a number of search engines in parallel and collates the results. The specific search engine that found your site was the UKplus engine/directory. Getting these sites recognised by the search engines appears to be a rather black art″. The other party replied that they used 37com which as the name suggests ran a search on 37 search engines at once.

Copernic and 37com, together with MetaCrawler and Dogpile were metasearch engines (or search aggregators) that helped to overcome the patchy results of search engines at that time.

The basics

So for setting up a website from scratch, what skills and resources were required?

The first requirement was a domain name, west-malling.co.uk in this case. I used GetDotted.com to find an available domain name and registered it for 2 years for £28.

Next you needed a service to host your website. In this case I used GetDotted's sister service Freeola, which provided free website hosting.

You now needed to be able to create your website pages. As an ex-programmer I wanted to write the code myself, but an alternative would have been to use a website builder such as WordPress. The editor I used at that time was Microsoft FrontPage, although the impressive NotePad++ has been my go to choice since.

To learn to create HTML (hypertext markup language) is surprisingly easy - you could just include ″Hello world!″ in your home page (typically index.htm) and this would be displayed on your website. Add a bit of style and you can embolden it. You can then gradually experiment with various styles and structures and develop more complex pages. You can also look at the html code for any other site you like, to see how they achieved their results. (This is helpful as a learning tool but makes it easy for miscreants to duplicate a website for nefarious purposes).

Site management

When developing websites on a home computer it's handy to have a local server for testing - I chose to use XAMPP, which is free and fairly straightforward to set up. XAMPP is an acronym for (Cross) Platform, (A)pache, (M)ariaDB/MySQL, (P)erl and (P)HP, reflecting its core components for web development. Of these, Apache is the HTTP server - which like the leading web server nginx is open-source.

For West Malling the snag was uploading files to the web host. This would normally be achieved with FTP (File Transfer Protocol), but one of Freeola's restrictions was that you had to use their Internet connection in order to do this. As we were using another provider the solution was to use HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) instead. Browsers use HTTP to communicate with the web server and access web pages, images etc. It can also be used for file uploads, so I wrote an HTTP file maintenance system to upload and manipulate files. This was written with PHP. (Fun fact: PHP is a recursive acronym, as it stands for PHP Hypertext Pre-processor.)

PHP runs on the server and generates HTML. Unlike HTML however, if the web server is correctly configured a user cannot see the PHP code, only the HTML that it produces.

From 2014 I gradually transferred my website hosting from Freeola to PAC Web Hosting Ltd. Without Freeola's restrictions I was finally able to use FTP, initially through CuteFTP and when that broke, Core FTP.

West Malling Resource Centre launches

It was now time to launch the fetchingly green website, and find out whether it would be of use to anyone. Like many sites of that time it was quite wordy and with limited graphics, in response to the slow Internet connections that most users faced.

Media interest

One of the sites I arranged mutual links with was the local Kent Messenger newspaper. In early 2001 I received an email asking me to tell them all about the site, and this led to one of their reporters visiting us for an interview. The photo they took required me to lean unnaturally close to the PC monitor, but they insisted this was necessary.

2001

Wikipedia

One of my favourite sites, Wikipedia, was launched in 2001. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger with the intention of being maintained by the community. This approach was highly successful, and at the time of writing Wikipedia proclaims itself to be the largest and most-read reference work in history.

Atko.org

In October 2001 I acquired the atko.org domain, chiefly to use for my main email address.

We had been using NTL as our Internet Service Provider, and they provided a Cable & Wireless cwcom.net email address from around 1999. The NTL service closed down in 2001 and transferred to Boltblue, although I retained my original cwcom.net email until 2006.

The use of the atko.org domain for emails was partly to protect against future changes of email addresses imposed by jostling Internet players.

The atko.org domain had no website until around 2011, when it was used for a family album based on Web Gallery Wizard, a service since replaced by Shozam!. Not much happened with the domain until 2016, when I wanted a website for my Land Rover build blog.

2002

West Malling memories

Recording the memories of past and present West Malling residents was a big step, as it created a semi-interactive element for visitors.

There were three hugely significant contributors who spurred on this initiative.

In 2002 I was contacted by Richard West, who had lived in the town until he was 22 before moving elsewhere in Kent in 1971 and not having revisited since 1984. In his own words ″I retain very fond memories of the town, the football and cricket clubs as they were back in the day and cycling around the area on my trusty 3 speed cycle purchased of course from Rogers as a 13th birthday present″.

Richard went on to provide the first of over 1,000 memories that were eventually submitted.

The next major contributor came in 2004 - Phyllis Stevens. She was 89 and her detailed memories went back to 1925. Phyllis provided a commentary on each shop in the town together with anecdotes of her life that demonstrated her amazing memory.

Phyllis was also instrumental in us acquiring the memories of Annie Couchman.

Annie was born in 1897 and lived all her adult life in West Malling, working for 33 years at Foreman’s bakery in the High Street. Annie left an account of her life with her friend Maud Souter. Annie's great nephew Chris Longdon came across Maud while she tended Annie's grave, and through that connection those memories came to be published on our site. Information doesn't always travel on a super highway!

2003

MySpace launches

MySpace launched in 2003 and was the first social network to reach a global audience. From 2005 to 2009 MySpace was the largest social networking site in the world, and in June 2006 it became the most visited website in the United States.

Many parties made and lost substantial fortunes through subsequent changes of ownership and the service gradually fizzled out.

2004

Facebook launches

Facebook was created in 2004 by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg and four others as an online version of Harvard's face book directories.

Membership was initially limited to Harvard students, gradually expanding to other North American universities and later beyond academia.

Wikipedia tells us that as of December 2022 Facebook claimed almost 3 billion monthly active users. As of October 2023 it ranked as the third most visited website in the world, and the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s. You've probably heard of it.

Linda's sites

While living in West Malling Linda took up an interest in using crystals for healing purposes, and we set up a website for her Kings Hill Crystals enterprise.

Linda subsequently started to design and make her own jewellery range based on crystals, and a site was developed to advertise her White Dove Crystals range.

Fortunately Linda's goal was enjoyment rather than commercial growth, so there was no need to add stock control and payments systems to these sites. In practice she would probably have used an online market place like Etsy, which launched in 2005.

Interesting fact: The Etsy shop ellaina boutique listed below is still in operation. It is run by Sue Bradbury of North Dakota, a star seller with an outstanding track record. She named her boutique after a childhood nickname, but I think I've digressed quite far enough now.

2006

Twitter launches

At the time of writing this product is owned by the mercurial Musk and renamed as X.

Founder Jack Dorsey is quoted as saying that the name 'Twitter' was chosen as it described ″a short burst of inconsequential information″. The idea was that posts should be brief - initially just 140 characters.

The service was launched in July 2006 and proved popular - by 2012 more than 100 million users produced 340 million tweets.

2007

West Malling baptisms

In July 2007 we received an email from Debra Buchanan asking if I would care to host a copy of the transcripts of the West Malling Parish register. Debra had already transcribed baptisms from 1813-1931 from the microfilm records.

Debra, a family history researcher based in Australia, took on the role of Snodland OPC (Online Parish Clerk) because she had many connections to that parish and nearby parishes like West Malling.

Debra sent an Excel spreadsheet of the first two registers covering 1813 to 1879 as promised, followed later by the rest.

This was slightly problematic as I was not familiar with the databases supported by my web host. Fortunately my eldest son Tom was able to set up a MySQL database for me and show me all I needed to know to operate it. With a fair bit of manipulation the records were transferred from Excel to MySQL. This was not entirely straightforward as the original records were not consistent in their content and format, and residents (or clerks) often misspelt names. As the originals were all handwritten Debra had to interpret every entry and include a ? against any questionable entry. The Baptisms web page provided a soundex comparison so that near matches of surname could be identified.

Later in 2007, Debra forwarded marriage transcripts for 1814 to 1836, extending to 1866 the following year.

However the marriages database was never set up, as on my retirement in 2008 we moved to the West Country and the Malling Action Partnership proposed to take over much of the site's content. In the event, the West Malling website was not fully decommissioned until 2019.

West Malling memories

The first memories were hard coded in HTML, but as more were received this became untenable. Another MySQL database table was created for this purpose, and visitors were given the option of adding or responding to memories online. Upon receipt, the system would email me their contribution for acceptance - very few were rejected in practice. One click on the email and their contribution would be posted.

West Malling website closure

Although the website was not further developed after 2008, visitors were still posting right up to 2019. At this time a message was posted to alert visitors of the closure, prompting one of the last entries to read: ″Hi Shirley, this is your Uncle John. Have just been going through West Malling Memories Site, it makes great reading and it is such a shame that it is going to close down later this year. ″ Well close down it did, and to save those memories for future reference they were compiled into a 375 page book. This was after personal emails and potentially contentious comments were redacted!

2009

WhatsApp appears

WhatsApp was founded by two former employees of Yahoo! with the idea of indicating if a user's Contact was at work or on a call. It had a slow start but picked up traction when Apple implemented Notifications on iPhones. From here it developed into a cross platform messaging service. The later introduction of message groups and audio & video calls created a broader social media service.

In 2014 WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook (now Meta) which upset some users but did not materially change the product. However in January 2021, WhatsApp changed its Privacy Policy to allow them to share user data with parent company Facebook. Many users then dumped WhatsApp for more private services such as Signal and Telegram - and reader, one of those users was me.

Henstridge Online launches

When we moved to Henstridge in 2009 we did not know the area well. As we wanted to learn about its history and local attractions I decided to develop another local website.

I was fortunate again in acquiring some parish records. Sir Mervyn Medlycott Bt had published a churchyard survey in 1997 and he gave us permission to use his findings. Many of the gravestones had fallen or become otherwise illegible since his survey, so this work was invaluable - even though I had to convert his Word document into database records. Some years later this work was augmented by a churchyard survey undertaken by local student Rachel Napper, who was similarly willing to share her results.

An Interact! page was set up for visitor participation, similar to the West Malling memories. It proved popular at first in the absence of competition, but lost out to the increased use of neighbourhood features in Nextdoor.com and Facebook. These allowed residents to share, chat, buy & sell in a fully interactive fashion.

Unlike the West Malling site we set up an Attractions page where users could select the type of destination and travel distance, and then display the results as a list or on a map.

Some years later the home page was redesigned as a notice board, primarily for events listings and notifications. The pins of these notices could be clicked to remove the notice, a frivolity that probably no one ever found!

When it was time to wind down the site it was relabelled as Henstridge Offline and retained for a few months for reference before finally joining the great website graveyard in the cloud.

Wessex Court website launched

Even more localised than Henstridge Online was the Wessex Court website, originally on WessexCourt.net and later WessexCourt.org.uk. This site listed all the residents (included offspring), hosted a photo gallery and showed how the development had arisen from the original farmyard.

A secure area was set up to enable Wessex Court home owners to access records relating to the management company. In the event this aspect never took off, but the site was retained until the domain expired at the end of 2022.

2010

Instagram launches

Instagram is an image based social media platform that launched on iPhones in 2010. It proved to be reasonably popular, gaining a million users within two months and give or take a billion 8 years later (during which time it was consumed by the voracious Facebook folk).

2011

Cornish Period Escapes

In 2010 I agreed to help Rod and Nick set up a basic website for their Coachman's Cottage holiday rental at Marazion. Linda had met Nick years earlier on a history course in Tonbridge. Their retirement took them further west than ours - Godolphin Cross in Cornwall.

The website went live in 2012 and was extended a year later to accommodate a second rental, Abbey Stables in Penzance.

The website was quite straightforward other than the inclusion of a booking system - this required a lot of fiddly javascript to display weekly availability and rental costs for each month.

Rod had lots of ideas for improving the marketing of their rentals, including modernising the website with videos and enriched visuals. Rod implemented a new Wordpress website in 2020, and it was a great improvement over our earlier static design.

2012

Sherborne Museum

Linda had been volunteering at Sherborne Museum since 2008, leading eventually to running their shop. The museum relied heavily on volunteers, many of whom were retired. Their main website had been developed for free by the curator's son, who wrote HTML without using a content management system, just like I had been doing.

When linguaphilic Elisabeth Bletsoe took over as Museum curator their council agreed that she should take over publicity matters, including further development of the website. As I was freely available, in 2012 I took over responsibility for the website to help Elisabeth make the changes she wanted.

The main site was hosted by 1&1 (since rebranded as IONOS). A subsite of wartime memories (MDAM - Make Do and Mend) had been developed in ASP.NET with a Microsoft SQL Server database. ASP.NET (Active Server Pages Network Enabled Technologies) was new to me. However I was not responsible for supporting MDAM and as 1&1 supported both MS SQL and MySQL the MDAM subsite could be retained unchanged.

Further enhancements

The menu on the existing website took up a lot of valuable screen space. The menu was now made horizontal with a series of drop-down menu trees.

Apart from design tweaks, Elisabeth was keen to establish a social media presence. The museum set up a blog, Twitter and Facebook accounts - with links to these on the home page. If the user had not given permission to display tweets, or javascript was not enabled, the space would feature a random artefact instead.

Those users without javascript would also miss some other treats, such as leafing through visitor memories or exploring the doll house.

One of the imperatives for the museum was to raise funds. Even when grants were successfully awarded these often required matched funding. Enter local historian and genial genealogist, Luke Mouland. Luke is a man of many hats, and one of these bore a Fundraiser label. Luke set up a scheme for individuals to sponsor a museum artefact for the year, and a MySQL database was set up to store details of sponsorships and objects.

The museum website needed to be continually updated for events, newsletters, lectures, vacancies and so forth. Another change was to incorporate responsive design so that the site displayed well on different devices, especially important when Google changed its weighting in 2015 to favour mobile sites.

The EU's General Data Protection Regulation was another factor, requiring a user's permission before setting cookies on their device.

The last major change however was to incorporate a new house style, colours and logos designed by Wyke Creative.

By 2021 the Museum had acquired funding to modernise their website and provide a more engaging experience for visitors. Wyke Creative were charged with the project, which they implemented on a new domain, sherbornemuseum.com. The opportunity was taken to simplify the site by removing the MDAM subsite and members' area and reducing the number of top menu items from 43 to a more manageable 25.

There was a changeover period during which the old site redirected to the new, email accounts were transferred and search engines sorted themselves out; we were finally able to decommission the old site in 2023.

2013

Hilary Cholo

Hilary Cholo is the artistic pseudonym of Peter Thompson, a cabinet maker and artist of international renown who lives just down the road. Peter asked if I would look at his website as it needed updating, and on inspection it turned out to be a Flash site. Adobe Flash was often used for creative site designs but with the advent of HTML5 this became less attractive - as was its closed nature and security concerns.

Back in 2013 I didn't want to learn how to modify a Flash site, and so I chose to rewrite it predominantly in Javascript (js) code. It was set up as a one page website, using js to repopulate the page for each menu selection. This allowed a fast transition to mirror the initial Flash design.

Peter generously recompensed me with wheels of Montgomery’s cheddar, echoing Rod's previous donations of beer.

Persephone Pictures

Local artist Angela (Persephone) Warden asked me to set her up a website too, having seen Peter's Hilary Cholo site.

Persephone had studied art at the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art at Oxford, and also art and geography at training college. She had taught both for many years but was now spending most of her free time painting and developing her calligraphy skills.

Setting up perseph.co.uk was straightfoward, being a small static website and only changing design once during its 8 year life.

Sadly Persephone passed away suddenly at home in September 2021, at the age of 84.

Wot's On website

In 2013 my friend John Edwards and I took over responsibility for the Henstridge Wot's On village magazine. It had previously been a church magazine assembled by resident Gerald French using Serif PagePlus software and then printed at his home. These would be given to church volunteers to fold and then deliver. We agreed with the Parochial Church Council that it would become a non-profit community magazine, professionally printed and funded through advertising.

Part of the relaunch involved setting up a website to hold archive copies and to display advertising rates and publishing dates. To this end we acquired the wotsonhenstridge.info domain in August 2013 for the princely sum of £4.73. It is a simple website with some MySQL database tables to hold details of magazine issues, advertisers and contributors

2016

Land Rover blog

My Land Rover project had started in February 2011, when I acquired an abandoned project from eBay and had the parts shipped from Worcestershire. The project was recorded in a Word document and each stage photographed, partly because I enjoy writing stuff but more importantly because I have an awful memory.

2016 saw the Olympic Games in Rio, but not a lot of activity in the garage. A good time to post my Word diary online, so I co-opted the atko.org domain for a Land Rover re-build blog.

The blog was maintained until late 2018 when the vehicle was completed, sold and trailered away.

2020

Projects website

Once the Land Rover was rebuilt a number of other projects sought their spot in the sun. Some of these had been patiently waiting for many years. It therefore seemed a good idea for me to expand the Land Rover blog into a more generalised projects website.

2021

Lloyd's System Redesign

I registered the atko.uk domain in 2020, probably because it only cost £10.15 for two years. It was a useful domain to host a Lloyd's System Redesign website.

Linda and I first met at the Corporation of Lloyds in London before we relocated to their new offices in Chatham, Kent. We worked on the Direct Data Entry (DDE) component of a large and complex system redesign project. DDE ran on a PDP 11/70 minicomputer system that took data from a team of LPSO (London Policy Signing Office) data entry clerks for overnight processing and transfer (by magnetic tape!) to the IBM mainframe system.

We had many mutual friends and acquaintances from that period as scores of contract programmers were engaged during the course of the project. This website was a way to record some of these characters and our life in Chatham.

2022

In 2022 I was nominated Sherborne Museum volunteer of the year, although I'm not the first in our household.

Linda had been nominated previously for her staunch support of the Curator, who appreciated her 'can do' attitude - an uncommon trait in the museum at that time.

The Wordle craze

As described in the Underwood Typewriter project, Welsh programmer Josh Wardle developed a word game called Wordle which became hugely popular.

Typpo

This gave me the idea of writing a similar game based on a typewriter theme, as described on my Underwood project page. Having decided to call it Typpo, I acquire the Typpo.org domain name on 21 February.

Unlike my previous websites this was to be a single page progressive web application (PWA). That meant that after sourcing and formatting active and passive wordlists I had to learn how to design a PWA, incorporate audio files, set timeouts and write asynchronous javascript functions.

2024

Projects facelift

The Projects website is revamped with a new look and this Website Development project added.

Summary

Building these 15 websites has been an interesting journey allowing me to learn new skills with the bonus of providing a useful service and helping out a few others.

My first website, West Malling, comprised 445 images, 3,272 lines of code over 42 files, 5,503 baptism records and 1,085 memory submissions.

This was eclipsed by my final major site, Sherborne Museum, with more than 700 images and 6,130 lines of code spread over 65 files.

Dynamic dislikes

My sites are quite static compared with modern sites, which have many features I find unhelpful. This is because my sites were set up predominantly for information purposes and not to provide an immersive user experience. With some sites it is difficult to find basic information such as opening times, which is often the main reason for visiting the site.

I have eschewed cookies as far as possible, save for those like the Museum that required Google analytics (to find out the number of visitors, the browsers they use and the most popular parts of the site). In 2002 the EU launched a policy requiring site visitors to be able to opt out of having cookies stored on their devices. Many sites make it inconvenient to do this, and if you don't want cookies stored you are often asked again whenever you revisit that site.

Unfortunately there are other ways the likes of Facebook and Twitter track users and you don't necessarily have to be logged in or even have an account with them. When Sherborne Museum set up a Twitter account I asked site visitors for permission to display their latest tweets on the home page as otherwise Twitter could track the visitor.

Another way that websites encourage participation is using pop-up windows that pester you to join a mailing list or receive notifications.

Finally, a pet dislike of mine (but apparently not to many others) is the automatic playing of audio files & video files and distracting scrolling galleries. None of these has featured in my static websites, so apologies if you don't feel sufficiently engaged!

Internet Archive

The Internet Archive has been a tremendous help to resurrect the sites above. How did the Internet Archive help? Well here's a (shortened) description from their site as of July 2024: ″The Internet Archive is building a library of Internet sites and other cultural artefacts in digital form. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge.

We began in 1996 by archiving the Internet itself, a medium that was just beginning to grow in use. Like newspapers, the content published on the web was ephemeral - but unlike newspapers, no one was saving it. Today we have over 28 years of web history accessible through the Wayback Machine and we work with 1,200+ partners to identify important web pages.

Today our archive contains: 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, 15 million audio recordings (including 255,000 live concerts), 10.6 million videos (including 2.6 million television news programs), 4.8 million images and 1 million software programs″.

Their Wayback Machine takes periodic 'snapshots' of sites and was of great help for me to track my changing websites over the years, as well of those for third party sites shown above. Note that their 'snapshots' are not image files but the actual HTML code, so their original links can be followed if they too are archived.

Tech Geeks and Tech Bros

Pioneer World Wide Web developers were often hobbyists exercising their geekiness. They may well have otherwise been radio hams, or perhaps users of online services like CompuServe, WAIS, Gopher, Archie and various Bulletin Board Systems.

Looking again at the Villages Online site for 2003, there were over 850 village websites listed. Some of these shared a webmaster but there were many hundreds of individuals giving up their time to provide a community service.

Indeed, when Tim Berners Lee developed the world's first website it was always the intention that this new technology would be freely available, for the wider communal good. Even now in 2024, much of the data and software underpinning the Internet is supplied and maintained for free. Two invaluable sources I've used here, Wikipedia and the Internet Archive, are free to use (but donations welcomed!).

What was not widely anticipated in those early years was the vast wealth that would accrue to a handful of wannabe billionaire entrepreneurs.

In the early days of Google their motto was ″Don't be evil″ - it now appears to be ″Do whatever you can get away with″.

Facebook is another case. A 2006 Rolling Stone magazine article noted that this 'hub for the 18-24 year old demographic' had been valued at more than $1 billion. The report quotes Mark Zuckerberg as saying ″We're not doing this to cash in. We're doing this to build something cool″. Like Google, Facebook became hungry, regarded their users as resources to farm and devoured budding rivals.

More recently, Artificial Intelligence has reinforced this dichotomy. AI has taught its models with content that had been created freely by others, in a high stakes battle for supremacy and the lure of vast influence and wealth. Users of community sites saw the fruits of their efforts hawked by their platform hosts. Stack Overflow was one of the first such platform to do so, selling their users' posts to Google for chatbot training.

Final thoughts: Fear and greed

Financial markets may appear to be driven by the greed and fear of investors. The dot-com bubble leading up to 2000 was fuelled by Internet startup companies being over-priced as investors piled into Internet-based businesses. Writing this in 2024, a similar bubble is being inflated for AI related businesses.

The term FOMO was coined in a 1996 research paper as the Fear Of Missing Out. The growth of the new Internet behemoths appears to be accelerated by greed and FOMO in concert. Google is one of the most powerful companies in the world but fears that chatbots may render its dominant search engine redundant, with a resulting collapse in advertising revenue. Netscape's Navigator browser once had a 90% market share; Word-processing Wang once had more than $3 billion annual revenue; Smartphone firm Blackberry once had 85 million subscribers worldwide. All impressive figures, but of little help if a business fails to innovate.

These are interesting times that will shape all of us …