The Changing Net

I really enjoy putting my feet up and having a good google. Almost as much as I enjoy typing blog entries in bare feet sitting on the train. What's happened? The formerly to-be-found text-heavy informative pages have disappeared! I used to love stumbling on someone's nice long chatty account of the specialist interest the compiler had researched.

These old pages were, unquestionably, ugly, but what joy as a fellow enthusiast to stumble-upon them. I found an ancient page pulled together in the nineties by an Australian professor now himself in his nineties. He proved just as erudite and informative when contacted by email. This in sharp contrast to those innumerable snippety web accounts on show these days where you are fortunate if you spy a whole sentence pieced together.

We've for years seen, possibly at a distance, MSN offering a load of cobblers about celebrities, usually a photo with a paragraph of made-up (readable) nonsense. How I crave those heights of journalism today!

Alighting on the tourist information and Lonely Planet (!)  pages for Stoke on Trent, I couldn't find a single sentence in among the drop-down menus, clickable images to sub sub sub pages.

I have still found a number of websites by googling. There's a search engine that will actually ignore the top hundred websites leaving you in peace to find some decent content. The Geocities and Angelfire sites of old were chockfull of wording, with a couple of boxy rectangular 2d pictures to wash it down with.

The data on Ancestry is terrific, but needs a writtem narrative to make sense of it all. In the meantime, if you find a site with journalistic-length content, give them a thumbs up.