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Who's the Union Oyster House of Boston bloggers?
By adamg on Mon, 08/27/2007 - 10:29pm
The recent demise of long-time blog Carpundit got Jason Butler to wondering: Who's been blogging the longest in the Boston area? He started in March, 2001. Who was blogging before then?
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Comments
Well, if LJ counts...
I was LJing as of 2002. A lot of others go back further on LJ. I also was keeping up a personal webpage (in hand-coded html!) on a near-daily basis from about 1997 to 2002. I imagine others were doing it before me. What are we counting here?
I miss Carpundit. :o\
http://1smootshort.blogspot.com
I had a *gasp* Geocities
I had a Geocities in '99 back before Yahoo bought 'em up.
I miss Carpundit, too. He left me with no closure. I would've liked a nice, sappy goodbye. :(
2001 for me
I moved to Boston in late April of 2001: http://grahams.livejournal.com/92850.html
But I had been here a few times doing interviews and apartment hunting the months leading up to then...
read me, dr. memory lane
My first spatch.net frontpages started in the summer of 1999, back when the only kind of "blog" was Slashdot's ilk, merely entries involving web links (web log -> blog, thank you very much) and I didn't consider my first-person essay entries to be like that, so I just called them "frontpages."
The first one involving the MBTA is dated December 22, 1999 and tells the tale of my visit to the Red Line's Lost & Found station at JFK, and how I was offered my choice of other people's backpacks when the one I was looking for hadn't turned up. This, of course, was in a much more innocent age, when an unattended backpack on a train could easily have been picked up and brought to Lost & Found rather than halting the entire transit system for hours while the bomb squad is called in.
In late 2000 I coded a posting backend entirely in Perl for another site of mine which has now disappeared, along with its entries, because I decided at the time I thought making one or two line thingamabobs was silly. Oh how times have changed.
Nowadays my "frontpage" updates are typically LJ entries I've co-opted, thus bringing everything around full circle. The LJ started in June 2003 and I swear I joined up only so I could make insulting remarks on a friend's journal without having to post anonymously.
The gargantuan Abbie the Cat has been doing his thing, off and on, since March 2001. I remember rabbits posting to Usenet in the early 90s, and I'm not certain when the whole "write like your cat/dog/pet" thing really took off, but I'd like to think Mr. The Cat was a pioneer in his own way.
Ah, Usenet!
My first Usenet experience was in 1989, during the Tienanmen Square crisis, back when Usenet was this exclusive club for college and DEC types and I was assigned the story about "this computer network the students are using to get word out of Beijing." Took me three days just to find a place that would let me on (a sympathetic sysadmin at a certain local Big Name University took pity on the poor reporter from the paper out in Framingham; he gave me an account on the condition I not reveal my source). One of my first e-mails was to somebody named Daemon who had posted something interesting; fortunately, another sympathetic sysadmin out on the West Coast somewhere read my note and wrote back to explain just what a daemon was (this was, of course, long before e-mail spam).
I'd started doing the Boston Online thing back in 1994 or thereabouts, but that wasn't really a blog. Dehanced for Lynx was sort of a hand-done blog, only updated monthly (mainly the same for neighborhoods.net - I see one neighborhoods.net founder, concordma.com, probably one of the first examples of hyperlocal writing, is still online, cool!). The first "modern" blog I did was probably something at Network World. Greymatter was involved, so it was awhile ago. But darn that Internet Archive: It's down today, so I can't check!
Well, if you want to talk Usenet...
As a grad student in 1989, I was entitled not only to an e-mail account (at a time when e-mail was miniscule in use), but also access to Usenet and the then-emerging world of gophers.
But...waaaay back in high school (we're talking 1978 or 1979) my buddies and I used to go over to the computing center at the college in our hometown and log into the ancestor of IRC -- the chat service on Dartmouth's original timeshare network.
old times good times
You know, I'm pretty sure I visited your lynx site, being a lynx supporter as I was back then (I even think I made a "Lynx Now!" button -- graphically, of course, but with a heapin' helpin of ALT tag text.)
The Wayback Machine doesn't have any of my -good- pages from 1995 or 1996, which saddens me. Ye olde Spatula Planet is gone, gone, gone (and with it, the best darn logo I ever coded by hand for POVRay, back before we had actual modelling programs! Fnar! You kids! Git off my lawn!)
Usenet
I started using Usenet in 1986 before the great renaming. I've founded 3 usenet groups, posted on one for at least 10 years (sad but true) and just finally gave up on Usenet about 3 years ago. I've moderated countless groups, which is by far the most thankless job in the world. When I left Usenet I had already started blogging. My first blog was in 2002 and I pulled it down and threw it away in embarassment in 2003. Then I started my second blog, which is still my personal blog. Now I've got my personal blog, my book review blog, and I blog at a bunch of other sites.
But I gotta say, there is NOTHING more fun than a good old fashioned flame war on usenet. Commenting on blogs, even controversial blogs, is boring compared to the craziness of Usenet, especially if you had a really good threaded newsreader. I used RN and TRN for years. Those were the days!
All of my usenet posts are, unfortunately, archived forever, but under my 'real name' so associating between me and my blog isn't easy easy if you aren't a completely creepy internet stalker. Only one stalker actually did this. VERY pathetic dude.
Blogging in 1997 and 2000
Off On A Tangent started on Thursday, November 09, 2000.
Before that I was hand coding a blog for Karlson and McKenzie on Eagle 93.7 from November 18, 1997 to April 1, 1999.
Online Since August 2000
I launched my blog in August of 2000, and I had various personal web pages at places like Tripod and Mindspring as early as 1998.
Ahh, this takes me back. I
Ahh, this takes me back. I had my first Geocities page in 1998. It had lots of blinking gifs and it was called: "Nobody could ever accuse me of being too normal." I thought I was clever.
I started "blogging" on OpenDiary.com in 2000. I didn't move here until 2004 though. :-( So I am hardly worthy of the Union Oyster House title! I still fancy myself somewhat of a blogging vet, though. ;-)