It was the summer of 2004. I was bored. I was lonely. I was sorting out a lot of change.
I can’t really remember how it all started, which is the chicken and which is the egg, but long story short: I found blogs. I started a blog. Other bloggers found me. I wrote. I commented. I made friends.
By the end of summer, I was reading and commenting on a lot of blogs, and I needed help managing it all.
I met Bloglines. Bloglines was an RSS program.
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It had a clean design and was easy to use. I woke up in the morning and hit Bloglines to see what had been posted overnight. During the day, I checked in a few times. OK, sometimes more than a few times. Bloglines made it easy for me to know who had posted and where I could go interact.
Although my fellow bloggers and I lamented that the RSS readers cut down on people actually visiting our blogs, and seeing our fine blog designers, we also recognized their necessity when maintaining a lot of relationships across blogs. We still visited each other’s blogs to comment. We still saw each other’s banners and sidebars, infused with style and personality. Heck, I could picture a blog’s design when reading in RSS after a while. It was just a matter of efficiency.
At some point Bloglines was discontinued. We found others, never quite as good, but the blogosphere was changing, too. There were other platforms to play on, other places to write, and more people hanging around the watercooler. Conversations moved offline, people’s lives changed and they had less time to blog.
Bloglines was an era. Fond memories …
What are your fond early internet/social media era memories?
I loved Myspace when it first came out in the early 00s. I was in high school at the time and spent entirely too much time on it. I loved decorating my profile with colorful wallpapers and glittery gifs. I constantly changed the music to fit the mood I was in. My friends and I would share our personality quiz results. It was so much fun. During my senior year, Facebook started gaining popularity. I was completely resistant to using it. But all of my friends stopped using Myspace, so I switched over too, and have been using the same account ever since....
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