Just North of Something Important

Rachel: "People on the Internet can get angry about anything."

About me (contact info and bio)

Jan 27

Rememberence of blogs past

In 2000, I would be sitting in the basement of the Alumni Magazine (in a repurposed house next to the student union, marooned in the snow), and on breaks from my editorial assistant position I would get on the older Mac (pre-iMac!) we used for layout and read Suck. At some point in all this browsing I came across the idea of a blog. And for the life of me I can’t remember how this happened, but somehow the term I Googled - or, uh, Yahoo!ed - led me not to like BoingBoing or something, but this other site that, for all I knew, was a totally legit blog. There were posts in reverse-chronological order, it was written in the personal voice, there were links, the whole shebang. I didn’t see what the big deal was. It took me weeks to figure out that it was actually a fake promotional blog Macromedia was using to help launch a new version of Fireworks. I didn’t know! I already couldn’t get half the reference on Suck, nor could I reliably tell when they were kidding, so for all I knew the fake blog was just an elaborate prank I wasn’t getting. Nowadays I think I wouldn’t have any problem telling the difference, but is that because I got more experience with blogs or because blogs themselves became a more stable, recognizable form? I dunno.

Anyway, I used to be even less able to tell my ass from my elbow, is the point here.


  1. barthel posted this