The first time I saw an advert on the TV for a website I paid attention. "See, I told you it would be important!". Now, like the rest of the target demographic, I just ignore them. yaddayaddayadda.com. Who gives a crap?

But every so often I find myself screaming at the TV. Why? Unrealistic portrayals of the internet that's why. Take, for example, a British Telecom advert from 1999 based around a kid in his room playing with ET (yes, the alien from the movie). The kid shows ET his webpage. It comes up on screen, a full screen smoothly rendered animation of the sun rising over the horizon. The kind of thing Flash would struggle at even if you let the file sizes go way above 100k. Of course, the following week the whole world and his wife wanted fully rendered animations on their website. "Look, if a ten year old kid can do it, so can you".

BT isn't the only one. It seems that despite everyone claiming that the World Wide Web is this massively glamorous and shiny place, nobody wants to include actual screenshots of their website in commercials. So they do enhanced versions. The same thing is happening with WAP. If you believe the adverts you get full colour 800 by 600 web access on your Nokia 7110.

So is dotcom land glamorous? Or does it need touching up with photoshop before you broadcast it nationwide? Or is the typical dotcom website so shit that they need to make up a pretty version to get people to visit it?

I wonder...