Anyway, this bout of nostalgia was brought on by a Slate piece that recalls the wild earlyish days of the web — web 1.0 in its ascendancy — circa 1996.

t’s 1996, and you’re bored. What do you do? If you’re one of the lucky people with an AOL account, you probably do the same thing you’d do in 2009: Go online. Crank up your modem, wait 20 seconds as you log in, and there you are—”Welcome.” You check your mail, then spend a few minutes chatting with your AOL buddies about which of you has the funniest screen name (you win, pimpodayear94).

And here’s a nice bit on the history of blogging:

There’s a similar trend in blogging. The term wasn’t coined until sometime in 1999, but several seminal blogs were already online by 1996, says Scott Rosenberg, one of the co-founders of Salon and the author of Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters, which will be published in July. Rosenberg points out that Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist credited with inventing the Web, and Marc Andreessen, the coder who founded Netscape, had both set up frequently updated, reverse-chronological Web pages by the mid-1990s. Later, a Swarthmore College student named Justin Hall began links.net, where he’d post a short personal musing nearly every day. “I think I’m gonna have a little somethin’ new at the top of www.links.net every day,” he wrote in his first post, dated Jan. 10, 1996. Hall’s site—unlike so much else that was on the Web back then—lives on today.

The biggest story along these lines is that Olympics highlights will be made available via YouTube. While it’s being called a “financial deal [that is] is tiny compared to the traditional TV rights deals,” this is surely yet another sign that we’re entering an age in which the Internet is directly competing against broadcast television.

Also in the news:

Google is rolling out a free music service that could compete with popular Chinese search engine Baidu.com. Again, we’re seeing another intersection between China and Google (Google owns YouTube). Probably not a coincidence that Google has set its sights on getting as deeply enmeshed into the Chinese side of the web as possible.

Also not a coincidence that Internet companies are falling in line to engage in a “voluntary code of conduct” in China and other “restrictive countries.”

With over 30,000 reporters covering the upcoming Olympics in China, drumming up an original angle is at a premium. So much so that Beijing “Internet pundit” Kaiser Kuo is advising foreign journalists to be careful in their use of tired or inappropriate puns, such as “coming out party” or “great leap forward.” (And this is coming from someone who writes a monthly column called Ich Bin Ein Beijinger?)

Meanwhile, in other world web news, a guy is being jailed for four years for using malware to spy on a 17-year-old girl he met in a chat room. And Thailand has halted the sale of the popular Grand Theft Auto videogame after a teen blamed it for the murder of a taxi driver.

And to avoid ending on a downer note: scouts in the UK are using Facebook to keep in touch and get their virtual scouting on, and the French are illegally downloading as many movies as they are paying to see.