Monday, August 25, 2008

In The Beginning


Christieland, 1989. I'm 14 years old and posting bulletins on Prodigy's bulletin boards looking for pen pals, probably making me one of earliest social networkers. I shared such details in my bulletins as my height and weight, eye color, what I liked to do for fun, and, naturally, my age. Soon I began pen palling with other early adopters, most of them lonely men in faraway places such as Missouri. I think I remember one of them sending me a card, and gifts. Where was Chris Hansen when I really needed him?

I made it through social networking (and pedophilia's) wild west unscathed. I kept up my own online journals, very private, dear diary type things, just by using Microsoft Works 2.0, Wordperfect, and then finally Word. In 2000 I started reading Randomly Ever After, after reading an article in Salon that the guy was fired from his job at CollegeClub.com because of the things he posted in his "online web journal." I became fascinated with journaling and HTML and created my own hand-crafted online journal, similar in layout to Gus's Randomly Ever After. The thing was a huge pain in the ass to update, and after a few months of this my friend Mike got me into LiveJournal. I joined in 2002 and have kept a journal there ever since.

I joined Google in 2002, slaving away on the AdWords account management team and learning all the ins and outs of pay per click online advertising; ins and outs that were created more or less by us, figuring it all out as we went and then seeing what the peanut gallery on Webmaster World thought. I joined Friendster. Then MySpace. Then I deleted my Friendster account. And then MySpace. And then recreated my MySpace. Then I joined Facebook, and LinkedIn. So yeah, me and the web go way back.

But this will be my first real blog. I'm too busy right now to figure out how to do it on my own, without a neat little plug and play Google product, but I figured I'd start somewhere. I also won't be able to be as reflective and narcissistic as I can be in a private online journal, so this will be a unique challenge. I bore myself even when I talk about stuff that doesn't really matter, which to me is all things external (except for motorcycles, cats and internet marketing), but we'll see if I can keep it lively.

No comments: