Sunday, June 10, 2007

The Internet Before Blogs

Before blogs (which, for me, means about a year and a half ago when I decided to find out about "some of those blog things"), I spent a lot of time goofing off on the internet every day, just like I had since 1998 or so. (Before then, it was just some time goofing off on the internet.) Nowadays, "goofing off on the internet" is fairly synonymous with "reading blogs" ... so what the hell was it I was doing on the internet before these blog things?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know what *you* did, but the first thing I did (1991?) was print out stuff from the IMDb. Then I joined the usenet group
alt.tv.x-files (taking the commuter train to Brandeis once a week so I could use Arthur's office to join in the discussions). Then the predecessor to the change ringing list. Not blogs, but still focused on communicating with people more than finding out cool stuff.

Anonymous said...

For at least 8 years, I've had my "dailies", websites that I check every day. I think the first incarnation of these was Slashdot, Coming Attractions, Aint it Cool News, Box Office Guru, and the Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5. This is still pretty much true today (in fact, 3 of those 5 are definitely still on my list), though it's expanded quite a lot since then, particularly since I've been sitting in front of a computer 8 hours a day, but I tend to think of blogs as wholly secondary to my dailies, even though I might actually spend more time reading blogs these days. But that's just me.