Ten years of blogging

Yep – this blog has been around for over ten years.

Here's a link to the Internet Archive for one of my first posts.  There were actually a few other iterations before this – but I can't find them.  The site was initially created with Manila – a tool based on Dave Winer's Userland Frontier.  A while later – a kid named Evan Williams and his team created a great tool called Pyra – which had a "daughter" product called "blogger."  You know the rest of the story.

What's interesting is that both tools provided a successful user experience that was LESS than the designers initially intended.  "edit this page" was a small part of Manila – but that is what worked.  "Blogger" was a tiny part of Pyra.  Evan has gone on to smaller things – and (surprise) .. that is yet another factor more successful than Blogging/blogger. 

What's the next decade have in store for us?  Smaller, simpler, yet more complex systems.  Yes – smaller (like twitter) and simpler (like the ipod) yet more complex (like the ipod).  John Maeda writes well about this paradox.  To the user – it needs to be simple.  Behind the scenes – it will be more complex – since the user's needs are understood and in fact anticipated.  So when I want to log my exercise, I should be able to use a device that I own (perhaps even something that comes with me!) … that will track my exercise for me – and report it for me – to all of the right places:  My insurance company, my physician .. my running coach? (if I had one) ..  sure! .. wherever I decide I want it to go.  Why not?  The technology here is easy.  

It's all about connecting. 

That's what the blogs were a decade ago:  A  handful of signposts – meant to help connect the dots. Now there are certainly more than a handful.   Yet (see my other post from today) .. there are far more examples of where we remain another decade away from thinking about these connections properly.