Blogging like it’s 1999

The header of my blog from 1999 to 2007

Testing Wordland, about which Dave says more here.

This is my second blog, and my first WordPress one. It launched in 2007. My first blog is this one, which (courtesy of Dave) started in the last year of the prior millennium. I had hair then, and wore glasses.

Is this true? I want more sources.

Irony of wanting more sources: there is already too much information. Examples: this window has 30 tabs, in a browser with four windows, each with more tabs than I’ll bother to count. I also have four other open browsers. Trying to stay on top of all this stuff is like standing on a ball. So I save a lot of tabs: 10716 with OneTab. So far.

The Knicks are better than they look to this guy. Even if the Celtics and the Cavs are better overall. The playoffs will be fun. Between now and then, the Celtics City series looks like it will probably be good too. (Never mind what teams you hate. I’ve always hated the Lakers and the Yankees, but have no trouble watching documentaries on them. Villains—even ones that aren’t really—are always interesting.

All new comments to old blog posts are suspicious.

I just gave this post a category. It’s from my WordPress roster. Nice. Curious now about how to include images.

Will our agents increase our agency?

Stowe Boyd on economic uncertainty. About a year ago I had a dream that three things would happen, though I wasn’t sure in what order (or if they would at all, being a dream). One was that the Celtics would win the NBA championship. Another was that Trump would win the presidential election. And one was that the economy would crash. So far, so two.

Some numbers. The U.S. has 4% of the world’s population and,
—consumes ~17% of its energy, and around
—20% of its oil (most in the world)
—21% of its natural gas (also most)
—8% of its coal (declining but still)
—16% of its electricity
—12% of its water
—15% of its food
—30% of its consumer goods (also tops in the world)
—25% of its raw materials
—and produces 14% of the world’s carbon emissions, second only to China’s.
This is from ChatGPT, so redraw your own conclusions. My provisional one is that an adjustment is bound to happen.

Dave kindly notes that I’ve been an early user of his writing tools for the Web. I should add that I was an early wannabe user of Think Tank (after I met Dave and his brother at their booth at Comdex in Atlanta in 1984… but I didn’t have a computer to run it on) and MORE, which was the best writing tool of any kind that I have ever used. Such a killer app. Wish it had been at the top of the food chain. (But its ghost lives on in the tools Dave has been making since then.)



8 responses to “Blogging like it’s 1999”

  1. Good to see this!

    One thought as a reader, though (I keep thinking of doing something via Wordland, but don’t feel that I have much to say at the moment): Seeing links to, for example, “this chair”, “this guy”, and “this book” with no idea what they are feels uncharacteristically, well, spammy. I get annoyed at the endless web headlines like “I lost 45 pounds last week with this drink!” or “This celebrity admitted that they’re a rabbit”, to get people to click through to sites that they don’t know to find out.

    Is it possible to do better, giving more of a hint of what’s at the other end of the link? Is it a limitation of Wordland? Would it mess up your writing flow?

    1. Interesting that you have problems with links that aren’t explained outside themselves. I’ve always written linky text, and in many cases expect people who are curious to follow them and discover something. “this chair” goes to a chair I’m tempted by that’s only $49. For all I know it’s not real. But does my not knowing make it suspect as spam? I don’t think so, but maybe decades of bad acting by click-baiters has made it that way.

      I’ve always seen links not just as paths to elsewhere but as part of the art of writing on the Web, and of posting on blogs (or anywhere). “Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy” David Weinberger says (or said 26 years ago, when he made it the 7th thesis of The Cluetrain Manifesto). Could it be that claim is no longer true? Or never was? And, if it is true, should we not make our creative most of it?

      I don’t know. I do know that I’m not going to change my linking style. So I guess my answer to your question is yes, trying to contextualize every link would mess with my flow.

      At this stage of my life, when half the males (and a smaller percentage of females) I grew up with are gone (demographics being what they are), I’m glad that I still have flow at all. So yes, I’m an old dog doing old tricks with links. 🙂

      1. I can see where you’re coming from. I, too, remember when the web was more of an art form, and we could do very cool things with surprising links. Maybe I’ve been bogged down in what the web has become (maybe since the days when we argued about whether .com domains would be a good thing if implemented).

        Time for me to reread Cluetrain, and let what you and Dave W and Dave W do remind me that there’s still joy and art in linking.

  2. Just read where the new Teams, i.e. replacing Skype, will have no facility to make telephone calls. Hence use the $20 now! 🙂

    1. Hello Roland.
      You left no email address, and your site doesn’t look fake… yet. So, who are you and what’s up with your new site?

  3. John T Hoagland Avatar
    John T Hoagland

    OK, OK, OK
    Back to tracking you ;-P
    Not stalking, just tracking your posts

    Drifted away from blogging, sometimes too busy, also using FaceBook
    Ease of posting nasty political stuff (some think my posts are nasty, but just poking fun)

    FB also helped me connect with some from my past (such as motorcycle racing)

    Of course you would have to mention MORE : damn but I still miss it
    I’ve gone through several iterations of later tools from Dave, Fargo etc, now on Drummer
    But I tend use it for organizing thoughts and projects

    Hoop : still following Tom Izzo and MSU ;-P

  4. […] by Doc Searls I’m going to try some more frequent notes based blogging, using Wordland to post directly to […]

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