EightBlack.

One of the things I miss about living in the US is my daily reading of the print edition of the Wall Street Journal.

This article in yesterday’s paper sums it all up.

The tale of the Web site Tired.com shows just what the Internet once was, and what it has become.

In 1997, a San Francisco Web designer named Mike Kuniavsky bought the Web address on a lark. He wasn’t sure what to do with it but posted a brief message on the Web site as a placeholder: “Are you tired? Tell us why.” Clicking on “us” sent visitors, mysteriously, to a blank email form addressed to tired@tired.com — an address that Mr. Kuniavsky set up to forward to his personal email inbox. The submissions were never to be published online.

The first message came within hours. Dozens more arrived within weeks. Nine years later, there’s a pile of emails in Mr. Kuniavsky’s inbox more than 42,000 deep — from overworked kids, overwhelmed parents and other fatigued Web surfers (more or less in that order, he says).

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 15th, 2006 at 2:19 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.