Flutterby™! : A Few Thoughts on 25 years of blogging

So it was some time back in February of 1998 that I made the first entry on this here blog. The exact details are lost to history because I was using a tool I called Newwwsboy, that took email with Markdown (though I don't know if we even called it that yet, we sure didn't call these things "blogs" yet) and stuffed it into HTML, and didn't maintain timestamps.

It's interesting to me to wander back through the archives. I, of course, was a very different person back then, but so was the world. I noted new Susie Bright columns in Salon, Pat Califia, Lisa Palac, and Carol Queen writing in various forums. Need To Know was the latest in tech news. The much lamented Mouth Organ was publishing.

The number of people who are now dead-named in the archives would have been surprising to me then. It's kinda surprising to me now. I'm not sure if I should go back and edit history, leave it as is, or just hide the archives (I see that I've whined about the values of archives before, back in 2012, when I rel="nofollow"ed a bunch of old links and made commenting a little harder).

A number of people just dead. Some I'd met in person, they'd been in California for a conference or whatever, some I only ever corresponded with, or admired from afar.

I started writing stuff here for two reasons: First, I had a long history of writing long emails, and wanted a place to save the better ones (whence the email interface to the initial engine), second, I saw what Dave Winer was doing with Scripting News, and wanted to build the "check it daily" site that I wanted to see on the web.

I don't know that second bit ever happened, largely because, well, it was me writing it, and I think that what I wanted to see on the web, that optimism about a new media space and new culture and building a fresh world from the wreckage of the Reagan era has largely dried up and gone away.

I have made some really cool connections and friends over the years. I'm sorry I don't keep in touch with y'all who are still here better.

I miss the newness of the web, that this was a platform we were all exploring, when the parameters, both social and technical, weren't so defined. During the Bush II Iraq invasion, TC abused some of the public Referer(sic) tracking I had in place to game a Flutterby to the second Google search result for "French military victories", resulting in me implementing some code to hide various entries from Google, because dayumn there's some stupid people out there. Of course that was back when most of the web traffic was human. These days I go look at the logs and it's obscure search engine after other thing I've never heard of spidering the shit out of the database. The humans are few and far between.

I was hoping this'd be some sort of grand epiphany, but right now I'm just gonna post it so it doesn't get lost in the morass of browser tabs. Who knows, since I've got all of Feburary, maybe I'll come up with something intelligent to say...