
In 1996, POV launched Re: Vietnam | Stories Since the War. The site was an early test of the potential of the Internet as a vehicle for community building and open exchange. Today, as POV announces Regarding War, an update of the original site that provides a space for conversations about all wars -- current and past -- journalist Sam Meddis, who wrote about Re: Vietnam in 1996, looks back at Re: Vietnam and re-evaluates the site more than a decade later.
"The Web is more of a social creation than a technical one."
— Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web
Think back to the mid-'90s when the Web was young. It was a world without Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed — long before social media became a household term — a time when Web 2.0 was, say, Web 0.2.
I remember those days fondly because, as USA Today's online technology editor then, I had the dream job of being paid good money to surf the Web and write about new and notable websites.
Every single day, wondrous new destinations would materialize in the online landscape. They ranged from art galleries and investment services to personal diaries and digital newsstands. They served up a feast of seemingly endless tips and data about everything from health and careers to entertainment and computers.
There was no scarcity of sites to choose from. Cyberspace was undergoing a virtual Big Bang, with constellations of websites growing explosively — multiplying more than six-fold in a single year, by Yahoo!'s reckoning, from 100,000 sites in '95 to 650,000 in '96. The only challenge for me was to pick out the very best from so many stars.
As Michael Neubarth, then-editor of Internet World magazine, said in his intro to the 1996 "State of the Net" edition, it was a "hectic and breathless" year. The Web propelled "change and adaptation in almost every walk of life, from grade-school students to corporate CEOs," the magazine's report concluded.
Amid all the online commotion that year, one of the sites that got my close attention was POV Interactive's Re: Vietnam | Stories Since the War, which billed itself as a gathering place for personal accounts about Vietnam's legacy.
A companion site to the POV/PBS broadcast of the Academy Award-winning documentary Maya Lin: A Clear Strong Vision, about the creator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., the Re: Vietnam website stood out enough for me to feature it in a Dec. 30, 1996, column entitled "The Net's best year."
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TAGS: re: vietnam, regarding war, soldiers, veterans, vietnam war, war