UGASports - The Life and Times of the Dawgvent, episode three (2024)

During the nineties, college recruiting rose from its obscure hobbyist origins and became an Internet monster.

As one example, Jamie Newberg worked for the Atlanta local TV show Countdown to Kickoff. At the outset of the digital revolution, he helped to start a site called Border Wars simply to accompany his printed publication of that name. But again, the response outstripped all expectations. Quickly the electronic version overwhelmed the paper one. Soon Newberg was logging an astonishing 1.8 million page views on Signing Day.

By this time, the whole dot-com thing was in full bubble. People were basically throwing money at anything with a Silicon Valley address. (You might recall Pets.com, Webvan, and other Bubble fiascos.) A Seattle visionary named Jim Heckman raised $80 million in venture capital to push his digital recruiting site idea forward, starting a national network known as Rivals.com.

Later, having sold his company to a Tennessee group, he also started a rival for Rivals: Scout.com. So yes, the same guy started the first two big networks, Scout and Rivals.

Except Scout forced him out before hiring him back. Confused yet?

Me too. I've tried to show my work with the links above. But maybe the best thing for you and me to do is to get back to Jason. Remember Jason from our first installment? We left him somewhere back in 1996.

Jason knew about the Grapevine and about the little group of Georgia sites then emerging. He wasn’t going to write a blog, and he wasn’t going to do the deep, daily grit-work of running down recruiting rumors.

Neither of these were his thing, and they were being done well by others anyway. He thought what was lacking was a good, thorough informational site. Remember, in the late nineties, anything more than text, simple graphics, and the occasional blinking header made a page all but unloadable.

Really, however, the point of this exercise was for Jason to prove to himself he could create a site. It was the act of an intrigued hobbyist—but with vast, unintended, and mostly wonderful consequences.

At Jason’s office was a system of servers named after planets. “Pluto,” like its namesake (still a proud and citizen of the planet community at the time) was “way out there” in the scheme of these servers. So Jason’s new project, finding its home on this server, was known as the Pluto Page.

He uploaded his content, via HTML 1.0—plain vanilla and easy to design—and somehow people began finding their way there.

Again, you are reminded that this was pre-Google, which was incorporated two years later, in 1998. Searching for subjects of interest was as much an art as a science in those days. “Keyword searching” and other techniques were in their infancy.

You could enter “Georgia Bulldogs” into Yahoo or WebCrawler or AltaVista and wade through page after page of links, many of them about the Eurasian country of Georgia or how to care for a bulldog. Yet somehow dedicated fans were finding their way to Pluto, directing their friends, and the audience was growing.

Jason wanted to serve them. “What’s in it for these people?” That’s what Jason had to ask himself at this point. “If I’m a Dawg fan, I’ll come once, look over everything, and come back—exactly why?”

What his site lacked was a solid hook. Who, exactly, were these mysterious visitors whose presence registered only as “page views”?

He researched the concept of “guestbooks”—a way for a visitor to say, “Hey, I was here.”

In other words, most of the Web was about providing content, but what made the Internet truly alluring was the possibility of interactivity. Sure, you could yell at your TV screen and throw a beer can at it. But the little head coach inside the screen didn’t duck. He had no idea you felt the way you did. Probably for the best.

But on the Internet, you could step up, have your say, and leave a footprint.

So, Jason thought—what if we allowed the guests to provide the content themselves? Clearly that would be a game changer. He didn’t come close to realizing the full implications of that thought, but he had taken a giant step toward the virtual beer-can-throwing that would become known as the Vent—as well as the world-changing Internet we know today, where social media can topple governments and create iconic celebrities.

With the guestbook, people could leave their names just as they did in a visitors’ book at a tourist site. An entry would be as simple as “Bubba T, Hahira, GA.”

Jason provided an area for the readers to say a word, perhaps a sentence, and it quickly took on a life of its own. The visitors began to talk not just to the site, but . . . among themselves. “Hey, Bubba T, do you know my cousin Elmer from Hahira?” Then, “Just wanna say our defense sux.” One small step for Jason, one giant leap for fankind.

Suddenly a static Web page, a repository of rosters and schedules, became the world’s most virtual electronic co*cktail party, a very real dialogue—and to try it was to like it, even if you were limited to a sentence or two. Georgia football fans had a new passion, even while the program itself wasn’t much to be passionate about.

Next: Becoming the Vent

Episode One

Episode Two