Flutterby™! : Old Skool 4 Life 2010-01-06 19:19:40.870045+00

Old Skool 4 Life

2010-01-06 19:19:40.870045+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

Genehack: Old Skool 4 Life. John calls out some thought provoking comments on the old blogger community and digital longevity from the Brad Graham / Bradlands / TheBrad memorial thread on MetaFilter.

That's... interesting. I didn't realize blogs had become old-school already. Still have fond memories of that whole fin-de-siecle feeling that we were all collectively inventing the next big thing... still posting to my blog, after all these years. I guess it makes sense; nowadays someone would start by posting their thoughts on facebook or twitter, and that would probably be enough for most.

In fact I'm watching much of the conversation move over to those places and blogs are starting to feel a little dusty. Which sucks, because <voice fx="cranky old man">short entries don't allow for real exploration of topics</voice> and all those things.

I want to expand my status update RSS feed to include all the things it's easy to toss at Facebook right now, hopefully that'll happen shortly, but I think getting the conversation back into our personal spaces is important.

I also have some musings on the portions of the internet that are secret clubhouses, brought to light by some of the anecdotes about Brad Graham after his passing that skirt around the "the first rule of forum X is you don't talk about forum X". I think one of the things that Facebook fosters is a feeling of "just me and my friends" that allow for the sharing that happens in such forums, that don't happen in the harsh light of the Internet.

Mars, the "Old Skool" bit was really a bit of inside baseball -- back in the day, JJG had this page called The Page Of Only Weblogs -- sort of the ur-blogroll, if you will -- and it had a section called "Ye Olde Skool", which listed everybody that was known to be blogging at some arbitrary point in the late 1990s -- November 1998 or March 1999 or something like that. (I started in September 1998 and I'm on there, so that brackets it on one side at least.)

Dan, still with you on getting the conversation back. Haven't had time to chase after the "reverse Facebook wall"/"golb" thing, unfortunately...

And re: secret clubhouses, I was expecting to see some Brad discussion on one of those in particular, and didn't -- did the plug get pulled on that one or was it just that none of us thought to post there?

I think none of us thought to post there. It was working as of a few months ago.

And I was reminded of that and Brad's involvement because another list I'm on erupted with the inevitable "Reply-To considered harmful" thread in the past few days, and I remember how nicely Brad defused a similar flame war between me and Jay Ashworth in that very place.