Fifteen years ago today, I was fourteen years old and about to start high school. Bored one summer night, I took the advice of someone on a journaling forum that I was a member of at the time: keep an online diary and let other people read an online version of my paper journals.
So I signed up for Diaryland (which, by some miracle, is still around) and started writing. This was a lifechanger. I discovered NaNoWriMo, one of my single biggest lifechangers. In a society where I felt isolated and never anyone’s best friend, blogging gave me an outlet that I could share with others if desired.
Over the years I moved to Livejournal and eventually here. Every single one of my entries–over 3000 in all–are archived here through some tedious labor and import scripting, which makes them easier to search and run statistics on. I’ve transitioned from writing about everyone and everything in my life to writing about whatever’s on my mind, in part because my life isn’t all that exciting. But no matter what has changed, having an online home has never changed.
This is a short post, but thanks, friends, acquaintances, and even a hater or two. Here’s to fifteen more years.
2 replies on “Fifteen years”
It is a pleasure to read about how you started as a blogger and how that affected you long term. I wonder what happened to those famous people on MySpace. How did they develop their online lives after MySpace. Or how vloggers on Youtube will live their online life when they are 50 of even 90.
This blog post just opened a little bit of the world of how we find or way online in our lives. Nice to read.
I’ve wondered the same thing. I never was on MySpace but would love to know what happened to some of these people. It’s still a little early to tell with the people who grew up with things like LJ and MySpace, but looking a little further back, we can see what people who grew up with IRC or mailing lists or other older technologies have done with their lives. Some of them have founded big companies, sure, but I’d bet that a lot of folks who grew up with this tech continue to embrace new technologies now.