who wants hellfire?

[Walkiry]

That's really the most exciting part, as far as I'm concerned. The rest is just ... convenience maybe.

For instance, I'll start at my son's web site www.caslucas.com and from there I can link to the sites of other musicians, including Paul Currari, so I'm off to his site, download and listen to a few things there and then follow a link over to someone he likes and admires, listen there, etc. It's just a great way to see what new artists (that you would NEVER have heard of) are up to. I hear better and more diverse music surfing musician's web sites than I'd ever hear on the radio.

Again - triumph of the amateurs.

I think one of the reasons why this is such is that the web has come a long way in a short time in terms of quality of content. In the early-mid 90's most people doing websites were simple amateurs with little knowledge of standards, both in terms of HTMl coding and visual presentation of information (this, of course, includes myself, some of my early webpages were an insult to the eyes). The fact that the W3C standards were consistently ignored also by browser makers (this includes both Netscape and IE) didn't help either.

One of the few good things of the dotcom bubble was that vast resources were invested into the research and implementation of good hypertext as a frontend to business. Most of these business failing didn't mean that the websites were bad though.

Nowadays most websites adhere to some underlying basic features over which content and presentation may vary. Having a consistent set of basic features allows people who are not "HTML gurus" to use the web effectively as a medium of expression of their work/hobbies. If you want to make a website about your music, paintings, photography and so on, any search engine will lead you to a nice tutorial explaining how to make an effective website for such a thing.

Of course, this is just MHO ^_^