Adland's Birthday - Nine years old today!

Congratulations kids, we're nine years old today! Or 121.5 if you count in internet years my collegue here insists, but don't ask me to explain the math on that one.

In honor of our birthday were having a competition where 100 adgrunts can win a super adgruntship! Yes, one-hundred of you. That's a lotta chances to win innit? Read more.

It seems like ages ago when I was sitting in my apartment up in Twin Peaks, San Francisco hammering away on my keyboard learning HTML as I went along. Oh wait, it was ages ago. 9 years. Gosh, time really does fly when you are having fun doesn't it?

I was freelancing for the first time, trying to find a steady gig in the creative hot spot of the planet, and was on occasion very frustrated with the mediocre or plain ripped off work that covered the billboards in the city. Inspired by Zeldman who had the ad graveyard, I learned a few tricks in HTML and hammered out a bunch of advertising rants on a wee webpage named Adland, which back then was hosted for free in Geocities SoHo, and before I knew it, I was hooked.

Soon I was getting a web hosting account before I even had my own home computer, and through the years the page may have changed colors often, but the name and topic stayed the same. Adland was always about adrants, badland ads separated at birth, advertising links and ad gossip.

You can see how it looked via the waybackmachine in Dec 21, 1996 (terrible scream-green as an antidote to Xmas), Apr 21, 1998 and Apr 22, 1999.

Soon the guestbook and email me button couldn't take it anymore, people were visiting in droves and they all had their own 2¢ to add about the adworld, their own theories of how a pair of twin ads happened and their own scoops to share. Clearly, I had to build something to accommodate the talkative masses, where they could share what they thought as comments to each film, article or even add an article themselves! Spiced up with an RSS-feed for good measure!
In May 2000 we opened the doors to the new Adland @ ad-rag.com, an advertising blog with a commercial archive attached. Shame the waybackmachine missed saving the images from that era. It was also the time when I got my very first dedicated server to deal with the commercial archives growing traffic, a machine that was connected straight to the backbone of level3.net in Amsterdam, Holland where I lived at the time. (See, I'm not kidding when I write "interests: globetrotting" in my profile).

These days both me and all the servers are located in Copenhagen Denmark, and I've nearly lost track of how many servers I picked apart and put back together again. I went from someone who barely grasped the concept of HTML and didn't even have a computer at home, to someone who actually builds her own linux servers to save some cash. It's an expensive hobby.

This calls for a celebration! Do you think you have what it takes to score a perfect ten on our ad-quiz? Because the first 100 adgrunts who do, win one month of super adgruntship!

Try your ad-skillz at the (link removed)AdLand Quiz: Ad Trivia, Truth and Myth. Good luck!

NOTE: here's the small print!
1) You have to be logged in to participate.
2) Each adgrunt can only vote once.
3) The quiz ends Friday 8th of April so you have exactly one week to figure it out, and tell all your friends to give it a go too!
4) The first 100 perfect ten scores will win one month of super adgrunt juice.

Please take a bow fellow AdLand admins who help make this place what it is today, Claymore the Ad Maven, Robblink the trivia King and Caffeinegoddess our main muse.

Update: Quiz is over here are the answers