The blog is an astonishingly versatile way of publishing material on the web – and Roger has just pointed me to a very neat and ingenious use of the medium.

Blogger Jeremy James explains that his late father, David, was a keen photographer, and a lover of poetry. He attended many poetry readings in the north-east of England, and took photographs of the readers, the audiences and whatever detail of the venue or the event caught his eye. He put together a number of these photographs, with commentary, into a little book which he tried without success to have published. On his death Jeremy and his brother found the ring binder which contained the book, and it occurred to Jeremy that the chapters would work very well as blog posts.

Poets in a Lens, the resultant blog, is a charming memorial to a man with broad interests and talents – it is also a wonderful record of poetry readings in the north-east in the seventies and eighties. Many of those pictured are still on the scene: there’s a lovely picture of a young Peter Mortimer, another of Cynthia Fuller, and an almost unrecognisable Neil Astley. I remember that wallpaper in the Colpitts, too!

On our home page we say that we “… have been designing websites since 1996 (and the World Wide Web has only been a reality since 1995).” Earlier today a client asked me ” I just wondered what your criterion/is/are in choosing the year you state the www became a reality?” Always happy to justify what we say, here’s the essence of what I told her:

I’ve had to delve back since I first made that claim well over five years ago. There’s a timeline here, though I did not use that when I originally made this claim. The key phrase is “became a reality” and that was based on the number of internet users, particularly private individuals rather than business use. It was the invention of the graphical browser that got things moving. Mosaic in 1993 was the forerunner for Netscape Navigator whose first full release was in December 1994. Internet Explorer 1.0 was released with Windows 95 in August 1995. These programs meant that ordinary people rather than geeks like me could start to use the net.

The foot of this page has a chart of the number of internet connections, you’ll see they start with 16 million in December 1995. Today it’s over a billion and a half.

I signed up for internet service on 28 June 1996 and shortly afterwards I uploaded our first web pages.