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That was my baby, and we had been around for two years by 1996.

Our archive of back issues is available to all. Go cruise our 1996: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v02/index.html

One sample issue, NSD 2.20, leads with the launch of Quake and the new MSNBC, whose DNS entry was suspended for lack of payment.

The main archive is here: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/backiss.html

That was my baby, and we had been around for two years by 1996.

Our archive of back issues is available to all. Go cruise our 1996: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v02/index.html

One sample issue, NSD 2.20, leads with the launch of Quake and the new MSNBC, whose DNS entry was suspended for lack of payment.

The main archive is here: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/backiss.html

I'm the editor, not the publisher, so I can't release financial details, but I can say that if you don't do it for love, you shouldn't do it at all.

URL should be http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/

Going through The End of Free, I found one site, Netsurfer, that posted a pretty good explanation of why they were shifting to a subscription model.

To recap my understanding of the issue, regular print periodicals are either completely paid for by users (mostly books, and your more distinquished journals), or by a combination of user fees and ad fees (most magazines and newspapers). A few periodicals get by purely on advertising (Village Voice, for instance)

It should be noted that in the mixed fee case, advertising provides the vast majority of revenue. Subscription fees pretty much are just used as a signal to advertisers that people are actually reading, and therefore willing to pay for, a magazine.

Since online pubs can completely verify readership, the signalling aspect of subscrber fees should have been rendered unnecessary. Also, since distribution of online content is cheaper than regular paper pubs by several orders of magnitude (though certainly not free, as was once touted), online pubs were thought to have an advantage over offline pubs in that regard.

Somewhere along the line, this new paradigm has, at least temporarily collapsed. I suspect a lot of it has to do with poor understanding of market forces and implemantation rather than the ultimate unfeasability of ad-supported, free online content.

Well, I don't know about the oldest ever, but Netsurfer Digest has a web page unchanged and online since June 3, 1994. It's the first beta issue of the e-zine:

http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/v00/nsd.94.06.03.html

Can anybody come up with an older continuously served web page? Netsurfer would probably like to write about it <g>

Incidentally some great 1994 stories in that one, echoes of the pre/proto-Net online world. For example a censorship crackdown on Italian BBSes and online advertising flamed to a crisp on USENET. Ahhh, the more things change, the more they stay the same!

This sounds like what Sun did in 1996, going after a bunch of domain names that included the word "java." See the NetSurfer Digest summarizing the story.

SeriousDomains would not be infringing anyone's trademark rights by selling domains with the word "Linux" in them. The buyer of those domains wouldn't be infringing by buying them, either -- it's what you do with them that counts.

For what it's worth, Microsoft has allowed many domains to include its trademarks for years -- windows95.com and activex.com are two examples. It seems odd that someone who gave away intellectual property worth millions -- his operating system -- would be exerting a trademark claim over domains while the closed-source bajillionaires at Microsoft are looking the other way.

You'll get a kick out my coverage of Troy and the Igs. Every time I speak to Marc he gushes that I captured the spirit of the Igs better than anyone else.

Troy

Igs

Judge for yourself.

You'll get a kick out my coverage of Troy and the Igs. Every time I speak to Marc he gushes that I captured the spirit of the Igs better than anyone else.

Troy

Igs

Judge for yourself.