Part 2: The Twilight of Web 1.0  − 1 October, 2000 - 1 October, 2002

This is Part 2 of a three-part story. Part 1: The Two Spokes and Axles. Part 3: The Stanley Street Hooligans.

So spoke-and-axle.com came about because people - artist people, that is - were creating sites that were wildly creative and rightfully getting the attention they deserved. The site that I created was really just a match-making site. It was designed to help people who needed bandwidth meet those who had bandwidth to spare. I helped them find each other. The technical matters -- FTP, clustering, pooling -- all that was coordinated by the hosts andhostees themselves. It was a primitive solution to the Slashdot Effect.

I produced spoke-and-axle.com because it was the right thing to do. I had no intentions of turning it into anything other than a free resource for the needy. In fact, I thought it would be a temporary site. Once somebody like Media Temple got wind of it, I was sure that they would step in with a real solution. Alas, it was a temporary site designed to help artists meet each other and help. It got k10k'd. Then I was asked to speak at South by Southwest. By then wi-fi was just starting to get big and I had moved on to airshare.org - a wi-fi enthusiast site - designed to teach people "how to stop worrying and love telecommunications." But before I switched gears, I managed to spend a few spare moments from my cubicle job taking screenshots of the sites that were in need of spokes.

At the time I was taking these screenshots, I thought it was interesting that they might be the only record of these sites in the future. I would later discover archive.org. If I knew the actual URL's of most of these sites, I suppose I could list those instead. The pictures look nicer.

Many of these sites I don't remember. I look at their designs and wonder how it is they ever got popular. But then again, it was a time of exploration. It was a time when people were learning how the web worked, struggling like me to find a place in it.

Spoke-and-axle was needed because when I created it, people were in a terrible mood. Many people were losing their jobs. Many more were embittered by the assholes they worked with - ex-adworld jocks and big-chested models posing as CEO's, VP's and playing with money as freely as they played with their accessorized pets. What most working stiffs at the bottom of the Web 1.0food chain did on a daily basis had a very real effect on the Web, however. Today that effect is unquantifiable but huge. Good and terrible alike, these screenshots are all I could salvaging from thetwilight of Web 1.0.

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