On the World Wide Web's Birthday, Remember the Forgotten Content Pioneers

Another year, another milestone in the history of this here internet. Where would we be without the internet? Tell you where I'd be: probably getting paid a lot more money doing something else because web journalism is notoriously not a high earner. I'd probably be doing marketing for a chocolate bar firm and eating too much chocolate (that I haven't paid for), making cool print magazine ads and campaigns for the chocolate, because print is still in rude health and everyone in the chocolate and print biz is doing cocaine together at parties and the music industry is still thriving and they're doing cocaine too and everything's just a little more rose-tinted. But no – 25 years ago, killjoy supreme Tim Berners-Lee made it so we could all get sucked into the vortex of WebMD. Now when we do our cocaine, we Google our heart rate and get scared instead of just ignoring it. Instead of witty, well-thought-out chocolate ads, we get flash mobs of vloggers bothering commuters who smile through gritted teeth before closing their eyes on the platform and briefly contemplating becoming a train pancake.

I jest, I love the internet. I love it dearly. Though I'm not sure whether I love it like a child loves its puppy, or like, well, an addict. I think it's a mixture of both. The internet has raised me perhaps better than my own parents have. When I asked my mum why the sky was blue she said she didn't know. I asked the same question of Bing and it gave me 13 million answers in less than a second. Wtf, mum?

In the days before Twitter and Facebook, though, the internet was a different place, and it had different things going for it. What follows is a very personal recollection of the websites that made me the man I am today, and a little wander down memory lane for those of you who also frequented these web-based trail towns, these homes for intrepid dial-up cowboys.

Perhaps the greatest content prototype was Eric Bauman's eBaum's World. Looking like the tacky interior of a neglected branch of Planet Hollywood, eBaum's World gave birth to a slew of flash animated memes such as the Badger song, Peanut Butter Jelly Time, Banana Phone, I Like Bukkake and one video which I've never been able to find which is just Hitler's head floating over a mountain range babbling nonsense. Some of these videos' successes could also be attributed to other weird video-sharing site AlbinoBlackSheep, which dealt in user-submitted animations. But none quite reached the legendary status of eBaum's World, which, bizarrely, still holds an Alexa ranking of 1,708 (compared to AlbinoBlackSheep's 91,716).

The oft-forgotten Liquid Generation also featured Flash-based activities, but they were less strange and slightly more conventional. They had a lot of games, like the breast-guessing adventure 'Whose Boobs?', coitus-judging epic 'Who'd You Rather?' and just normal movie poster games. They also had skits with parody songs, like a cover of Usher's 'My Boo' featuring the love triangle of Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston. They were also, as far as memory serves, one of the first people to do artificial jump scare videos, or 'sabotages' as they called them. You have them to thank for every time you try and watch an interview with an Olympian and it just screams porn sounds at you.

Newgrounds was much like eBaum's World and AlbinoBlackSheep – a user-generated content website for the angry teenage masses – but it had a slightly weirder, darker edge. Newgrounds had all the chintzy Flash games and shit, but it also hosted weird anime porn games like Frank's Adventure (actually the creation of German games and animation site Mausland, but let's not get into early German internet because that's a whole other kettle of fish) among many others. Its mascot was a red-haired boy called Pico who had a slew of games along with his friend Darnell (a pyromaniac) and Nene (who had her own interactive suicide game). It was the brainchild of Tom Fulp, a programmer who went on to form The Behemoth, the video game development company that produced Alien Hominid and XboxLIVE Arcade favourite Battleblock Theatre. Fulp has different ideas about the legacy of the aforementioned eBaum's World, however. "The flash content on eBaum's World was largely stolen from Newgrounds, and the site was a knockoff of Stileproject before Stileproject went full porn" he says.

Joe Cartoon, the creation of a guy called Joe Shields who is now a folk singer, was at the high end of internet animation. It was animated by Klasky Csupo, who are famous for their Nickelodeon shows like Rugrats and Aaahh!!! Real Monsters. Again it was the game format that prevailed – the most popular videos on the site were various small animals being placed in blenders and microwaves which the user gets to determine the severity of, naturally concluding in the explosion/ mulching of the creature in question. It joined Happy Tree Friends as the premium 'dark' cartoon of the time.

Back before LiveLeak purported itself to be some kind of extreme news channel, it was just called Ogrish. It had a metallic-effect logo flecked with blood, and revelled in its notoriously extraordinary violence. It was here that hundreds of beheadings in the Middle East were broadcast, my teenage self watching nearly all of them as they cropped up. On October 31st, 2006, I typed Ogrish into my browser and was met with LiveLeak, and the pretence of 'exposing the reality' was established. It wasn't just gore porn any more (though that's exactly what it is and what it will always be) it was political.

So there you have it, a cute little rundown of some cornerstones of the internet that still hold influence today. Even though now everyone uses about four websites max, remember that at one point, every site was a general store, a shoe shine, a livery, a saloon, a hotel in the Deadwood that was the internet. Now it's just one big grocery store. Sad, really.

@joe_bish