How quickly things change!
When the prototype BTG began back in April 1997 as British Theatre at The Mining Company (long story: the BTG as it is now actually made its appearance in November 2001), the big thing was links - links, links and more links. That’s what the company wanted, because that was what people wanted.
Those were the days when we talked about “surfing the Net”, and that’s what people did: went to a site, had a quick look, then hunted out that site’s list of links and followed one that looked interesting. They “surfed” from site to site. That’s what The Mining Company demanded of those of us who ran their sites, to list as many sites on our topic as we could find, plus comments so that our surfers would know what to expect when they got there. By the end of 1997, the British Theatre site consisted of a few pages of general comment on theatre in the UK and page after page of links - over 2,000 of them (liks, that is, not pages!).
I suppose it was the excitement of this new medium, that one could view, in the comfort of your own home, sites based in countries throughout the world. You want to know about a famous actor? Ken Branagh was very big then and the MC British Theatre site listed a dozen or more, and people surfed from one to another, only to find that most had much the same information (and much the same photos).
How things have changed! Not only has the Net grown up, but its users have too, and what they look for nowadays is reliable sources of information, and when they find one, they tend to stick with it.
Even in 2001 our most viewed pages were what we called - a hangover from the Mining Company, this - our Links Libraries. Now they are among the least visited pages and Reviews and News pages vie with each other for the top slot.
I have to say that I am delighted at the change. It used to be very depressing (nay, boring!), going from site to site on the same topic only to find the same information expressed in slightly different ways. At one point early on I got my wrist slapped because I started running news pages: “British theatre surfers,” they told me from the company office in West 42nd Street, New York, “don’t want news: they want links.”
Perhaps, I replied, they are looking for links to theatre news. Aha! bulb lights up! OK, I could go ahead with the news pages.
I’m not claiming any special brilliance for “discovering” this, because all I was suggesting was what I wanted when I was surfing on my own accord and not for the company. This was the time when we referred to the Net as the “information superhighway”, the operative word being “information”.
The other major change, at least as far as theatre sites are concerned, is the increase in reliable sources of information about actors, theatre companies and theatres, especially about actors. In the early days I used to talk about the “slobber drool factor”, the high incidence of sites devoted to actors (and actresses) which were motivated by love (or lust) on the part of the site authors. Look at actors’ sites now: those which are not put online by the actors themselves as part of their marketing strategy deal in hard information. Their authors have discovered that waxing lyrical over their subjects’ beauty, attractiveness, sexiness even, does not tempt anyone other than a few poor souls similarly driven by oestrogen or testosterone!
The Web, ladies and gentlemen, has grown up!