Wednesday, June 29, 2011

You Know You're an Ancient Blogger When...

...you were on Blogger before it belonged to Google.

...you remember The Truth Laid Bear and were a member of the Ecosystem before the Days of the Service Outages.

...you remember the days when all you had to do to find anyone who had linked to you was run a search on your blog at Technorati.

...you remember the Movable Type licensing brouhaha that led to the ascendancy of WordPress.

...you remember the SiteMeter scandal.

...you recall the days when all the stupid internet memes and quizzes were on blogs, not Facebook.

All of which are true of my seven years of blogging, which of course is like seventy million years in blog years, give or take ten million blog years. That puts me in the early Paleogene period of the Blogging Cenozoic, or maybe the very tailend of the Blogging Mesozoic. So I'm Paleocenic or possibly late Cretaceous.

Of course, there are a few who are older as bloggers. Most are only slightly older, but some people predate WordPress, from the earlier Cretaceous of early Movable Type. A few very rare surviving early Jurassics, like Jerry Pournelle, arguably were blogging prior to newfangled words like 'blog' and 'weblog' that distinguish the late Blogging Jurassic from the early Blogging Cretaceous. In Jurassic days, people called their blogs 'zines' or 'daybooks' or 'online diaries' or any number of other things.

[ADDED LATER: Thinking through the timeline more carefully, Google had already acquired Blogger by the time I signed on; but it hadn't done any of the major renovations, the most important of which was migrating Blogger to Google servers. It was those I was thinking of.]