I really wanted to do an April Fools post, something along the lines of me moving back to America and joining the Marines and/or the IRS.
However, it appears that five years ago I officially posted my first of many highly sophisticated musings.
Actually, movementarian.com started a year earlier (around June of ‘02) as an attempt to recreate The Onion… with my friends as co-authors. If you look at some of the older content from archive.org you can see that some of the of the articles were good, others sucked (mostly mine).
Several of the contributors did a really good job poking fun at some of the odd things running around in the news. For instance Andy Stedman penned a popular article that still gets hits from Google (probably because of the picture…): Man Reports “Public Goods” Problem Spontaneously Solved
Anyways, David Veksler and I took the site down around February ‘03 to relaunch it as a blog community… (kind of like the Engadget for satire and humor) all under the umbrella name of Collectrix.
That never really panned out (which is a discussion for another day) and during the last days of February and beginning of March I started looking at other target markets.
If you recall, it was during this time that the buildup for the Iraq war was also crescendoing. As I was against the invasion – and all wars – from the get go (even marched in vain at the Dallas protest) I looked at setting up community blogs for libertarian types. I attempted to purchase antiwarblogs.com but the owner wanted to hold out for higher prices (he ended up sitting on the domain to this day).
Instead David and a couple of my friends started buying up other domains to build blog networks from (visit this older link from Archive.org to see a small list).
Different times
Anyways, if you look at the first 3 or so months of archives on this blog you can tell most of my posts had to do with the nascent blog industry. It was started:
- 6 weeks after Pyra Labs (Blogger) was purchased by Google
- when LiveJournal was still independent (and still shitty)
- during the days of the RSS 1.0 vs 2.0 — Dave Winer vs Mark Pilgrim war
- before TypePad (I managed to start drama with Movable Type and Anil Dash)
- before WordPress (B2++ and Cafelog were the two living and breathing creations)
In fact, early in ‘03 I started corresponding with Donncha O’Caoimh from Ireland about adding new features to his build of B2++. He eventually joined the WordPress development team and I believe, is still very Irish.
It was also during this time that commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Andrew Orlowski (of The Register) were lashing out against individual blogs… because anyone can post whatever they wanted on them. It was the beginning of the end to the gatekeepers.
At the time I thought that the burgeoning blogosphere needed a group of defenders so I teamed up with an array of now A-list bloggers and purchased/developed a site called: ProBlogs.org (promoting blogs and rebutting player haters). You can still see some of the older posts from archive.org: 1 2 3
These included:
Roland Piquepaille (a French jack-of-all-trades, who now writes for ZDNet)
Richard Giles (an Australian-based Web 2.0 innovator)
Michael Fagan (a Canadian uber geek that has quite the digital pedigree)
Stephen Dulaney (a pioneer and popularizer of podcasting)
Elwyn Jenkins (one of the first academics to seriously study this new medium… my understanding is he had to go into hiding because of the mob or something)
Anyways, I can hardly attest to being a mover or shaker in this industry. I suppose I could make up a story about being flown into a Bosnian blog conference under sniper fire and mortar attacks, but someone’s already used that one.
I decided against becoming a billionaire geek and ended up going back to grad school. Smart decision, right? And over the course of the following years, I stayed on the sidelines and continued working within the antiwar/libertarian communities.
Some stats of how much beer drinking, girl chasing time I ended up spending on this web thing:
Movementarian.com:
Posts: 1305
Comments: 1450
Mises.org (about 4 years):
Posts: 275
Comments: 2135
Antiwar.com (about 6 months):
Posts: 27
Comments: 763
With any luck I’ll still be around in the next 5 years. However, I think I’ll try to spend more of my time posting super sexy music videos like Call On Me or Satisfaction. That’s why you started visiting in the first place.
Or in other words: in direct contrast to the lyrics from these band members:
Wow, I remember problogs. At the time I recall thinking “Tim is writing a blog about blogs. Wtf.” Now there are dozens of competing sites with such a focus.
With the cost of creating a blog network now effectively zero (see Wordpress MU), existing blog networks have to either buy out successful blogs to make any money. Collectrix was certainly ahead of its time.
Also, must you always post a picture of yourself shirtless? Although we have never met in the real world, I feel like I know your chest and arms quite well.
Comment by Mike — April 1, 2008 @ 12:32 pm
Wow….I’d forgotten about it completely. Amazing the stuff we’ve been up to in the last 5 years. I just blogged that it’s been 6 years since I launched my current weblog.
Who’d have thunk.
Great to be back in touch as well Tim!
Rich
Comment by Richard Giles — April 2, 2008 @ 10:31 pm