Be Where When

Stu Savory sucked Tamar into one of those meme games where you find your exteenth post, find the umpty-umpth sentence therein and append that sentence to the coagulating lump of other sentences contributed by those who went before. Sad to note, I couldn’t find my exteenth post.

It’s all Jeneane’s fault really.

I started blogging in mid-2001. The blog was on blogger and was called "Aging Hipster be not Proud." It was conceived as a confessional aggregation of bullshit that would go as far back as I could remember dredging up images and iconography like my first black leather jacket and switch blade knife, grade school rocket engines made out of shotgun shells, the ‘49 Ford days of my youth… dixieland bands, beer, bratwurst, and bravado… drugs… motorcycles… the other things… after a few posts I realized that it would be nice if someone would read what I wrote.

Chris Locke wrote (writes) an e-zine or an email newsletter or something called Entropy Gradient Reversals. His readership seems to encompass a range of personality types from the profoundly intellectual to the terminally hip, people in all lines of work from marketers to merkin manufacturers. By this time in the autumn of 2024 most of us had five or six years of web work under our belts, from serious site creation using tools like HoTMetaL and Dreamweaver to dabbling a little with HTML. I’m sure we could all posture and pontificate knowingly about frames and tables, but divs hadn’t appeared yet on our horizon.

Chris’ book "Gonzo Marketing" came out around the time that binLaden’s monstrous plans wreaked havoc on the American consciousness. (Incidentally, bin Laden is not a unix command nor a description of a full container, it has nothing to do with bin/login but if you have been coding since 1984 I can see why you would be confused). We wouldn’t have time for insightful marketing books for a while, it seemed. But Chris said to his readers, "Let’s blog." and Jeneane jumped in feet-first and created a group blog called "Gonzo Engaged." I thought that was how you did it, so a few months later, in January ‘02, I created a group blog too - copy-cat, sure, but imitation is the sincerest form of theft. Some of the people who signed on at Gonzo signed on to my sputtering attempt at web-pub too. But it soon became apparent that except for some communities that had a need to exist - and Jeneane is uncanny in her ability to identify these - except for a few group blogs, blogging is a solitary practice that eventually blinds you and puts hair on the palms of your hands.

That first blog of mine with readership > one has been cast in lucite and lives on a server here in Madison somewhere, but it’s no small task to resurrect the posts and count sentences. I couldn’t do it this morning when I was thinking I’d join Tamar in her silliness.

And now blogging is over and we have each been rationed one cubic meter of glistening computronium and it’s up to us to spend it wisely on all the compelling new applications that comprise Web 2.0. I’m glad blogging is over. Some people had begun to confuse it with journalism, and others thought it was a new communcation art form, and the most deluded of us, people like me, thought they had something to say.