A buddy of mine, Tony Sirois (check out his wild and crazy blog at http://www.tbonemalone.com/blog), sent this article to me:

History of Internet: 1996 Sample sites
http://www.msu.edu/~karjalae/internet96.htm

It’s not only one of the most entertaining and humorous things I’ve read online but also encompasses just how far the Internet has come. The amazing thing is back then, we expected folks to read everything online and to follow instructions (while it took millions of minutes to load gigantic images) and bypass thousands of animated .gifs. Today, usability experts would be in an uproar, but they owe it to these excellent examples of “what not to do.” Unfortunately, many Web sites out there are still making sites that are hard to use and might as well be coined an inception site.

Amazingly enough, in 1996 Lego.com was using “navigation” - can you believe it?

In case you haven’t seen this site, it’s worth checking on for mutliple reasons: http://www.midomi.com

At first glance it looks like a site that is for searching music, even having the unique ability for users to search music by singing or humming a song into their computer microphone. The site then generates a listing of results that closest match your tune. However, there is another wonderful attribute to this site - the ability to actually become a star on the site. You’re able to record your singing clips and post them to the site for others enjoyment. Interstingly enough, you find yourself on this site for way too long listening to everyone. It’s like online karaoke! And really, who doesn’t love that?

Check out how the site works: http://www.midomi.com/index.php?action=main.video&from=landing

Another reason why it’s important to get in on the video craze. Google just launched a new beta program “Adsense for Video” which will place text ads over Videos. Text ads will display based on the videos content and metadata. Yet, another reason to be optimizing your videos.

For more on Google Adsense for Video check out this article: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3628504

For a sample and more details view this: http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/02/google-launches.html