The Oracle of Apollo Snippets from the life of Apollo Lee

Web 2.0 vs Web 1.0

Alison of Bluish Orange hits the nail on the head. She calls it:

i loved you, 2001 internet, because you enabled people to create and communicate in ways that really meant something. i liked reading what my friends thought about their lives and about what was going on in the world. i liked reading what strangers had to say, too, as sometimes those strangers would become friends.

I started “blogging” here on January 1, 2000. (Note for the curious: My archive has a large multi-year gap in it. Never got around to importing it all to WordPress.) Back then, it seemed much easier to meet bloggers. There weren’t that many of us. Going to Fray Days (four through eight) allowed me to meet many of the early A Listers that I’d been reading, including Derek Powazek, the nicest most positive guy I’ve ever met. Many of them had heard of me, some of them even read my ridiculous little site. The blogosphere was a much tighter knit place back then.

I don’t think everyone should go away or anything. But, I really miss the novelty of it all, the thought that someone out there gave a crap about what I had to say, the notion that my stupid party reviews and other minutia of my life would be of interest to any other human on this planet.

I miss those days like I occasionally miss college. I don’t miss 4 hours a day of practice. I don’t miss getting low grades in lots of different subjects. I do miss having a staggeringly large population of delicious strangers to crush on constantly.

Maybe that’s what I miss about the web in 2007. The ability to find something nifty, something unexpected, a plethora of delicious strange writers to give me someone to relate to and wonder about.

I hear you. I know exactly what you’re saying.

I think part of it is just that we grow up, and the next generation doesn’t find the old stuff as cool as we did. We were all on the frontier of the web. That’s what you miss (I think). The newness of it all.

[…] I’m right there with you, sir. The upcoming new year will mark eight years of blogging here for me and Marc’s post brings the nostalgia back. It reminds me of Alison’s poignant letter to the internet of 2001 (previous mention here). With 850 million social networking sites, several billion people on MySpace, lolcats scattered everywhere, and Twitters flying in every direction of the compass, the internet seems more blessedly inclusive today. There is a certain amount of community that seems to have been lost, though. […]