Working the NY Times crossword, AOL and MSN and Juno and NetZero pop out as weird things to see show up as current-day answers. Granted they make easy crossword fill for the editor, and I guess it’s not that much different than the other archaic jokes and in-references that you’re expected to keep track of (OLEO, OONA, OBI, IBO…), but dotcom-era corporate names just seem more dated than most of the other topical references. The evolution of clues for these answers, though, is pretty interesting, as can be seen here in AOL’s case.
The Quartz folks made this list using a home-grown crossword clue/answer historical lookup tool, which is definitely fun to play with! Hmm, according to this tool, web in the WWW sense didn’t show up until 2000, dotcom didn’t appear until 2001, blogs exploded in 2005, and USENET continues to show up with surprising frequency. Crosswords are weird.
(Via Kottke)