On Internet culture

Way back in the early 90's, online community was Usenet. It was a big unmoderated free for all used primarily by geeks and college students.

Shortly thereafter, message boards started to pop-up all over the place. The first basically just emulated Usenet, only from a browser. In 1996, Ted O'Neill released the first version of Ultimate Bulletin Board, which was the template for all modern message boards.

At the same time that these Web-based communities were appearing, hundreds of new personal sites appeared every day. You could literally surf the Web for hours because everything was linked together in a big mess of digital anarchy.

By 2000, Yahoo was mainstream and something called Google was gaining in popularity. Pretty soon, you didn't surf anything, you just searched for what you wanted and went there. Online communities were everywhere and for every interest.

Instant messaging had finally become mainstream at that point as well, after a couple of years of "why bother" attitude. I was even using it for business purposes at that point.

All during this time, e-mail was about as standard as having a telephone number. While spam has threatened that, spam controls are starting to get better to the point where we can use it as a useful tool again.

Now the big culture hit is blogging, and in many ways it has restored some of the social anarchy to the Internet. Heck, I started doing it two years ago, and last year I launched this site for the express purpose of giving others the chance to do it with a simple interface.

The thing I like about it so much is that now I can surf again. For example, I've been frequenting the blogs on http://weblogs.asp.net/ because there's something new there almost every minute, and it's all about the geeky stuff from Microsoft I'm interested in (splashed with links to cartoons, policitcal rants and other such nonsense).

I need to get off my ass and blog more.