Michael Boyle’s weblog

Oof – this blog has been in serious hibernation. Interestingly enough, helping my friend Melora get her blog going has motivated me to revisit this place as well. More to come…

In the span of a couple of tweets and not more than 3 hours, Sylvain and CFD went from conception to birth of Pssstopedia, a wiki devoted to archiving and memorializing the history of Internet culture in Quebec. I’ve already contributed!

Without fail, the moment I wonder why I wade through countless MetaFilter posts (as I have been happily doing for ages), some wonderful person comes along and compiles a post like this: TV, When It Rocked and Rolled. Dear MetaFilter – you’re still one of the greatest things ever on the web.

Some news today grabbed my attention via Powazek: Stewart Butterfield and his fantastic crew are getting ready to release Glitch. There’s a lot more information in an article about the new endeavour: Watching the birth of Flickr co-founder’s gaming start-up.

This is really exciting news for me. I was a devotee of GNE, the pre-Flickr project from Stewart’s (and Caterina Fake’s) former company, Ludicorp, and this promises to once again take gaming down a wickedly fun road. While I don’t assume Glitch will be simply an expansion on that, having read about it and seen the intro video they’ve posted, I can already see enough of the amazingly quirky touches in this new project. I’ve never been into MMO games; but I’m very confident (read: terrified) that this one will be a very satisfying time-sink (!).

And I have to add: it makes me happy to know that this great dev team (arguably one of the greatest ever assembled, both by my subjective judgement and by any objective measure you could come up with) is back at it again.

Whoa. This month this is mikel.org turns ten (though the archives only go back to Feb 2000). I haven’t been very active on this blog in about a year, but it’s still alive and I am definitely coming back to it in the near future. Now that my company is entering a new, more mature/less startup phase, I’ll have more time for blogging.

Ten years is a long time for anything on the web to have existed, and in the blog world, it’s almost an eternity. There were already lots of blogs in existence when I started here – and those pioneers really inspired me (as well as proto-bloggers like Justin Hall) to start a blog in the first place. But it was nevertheless the very early days of the blogosphere when I got this going, and I remember those early days of blogging very fondly.

Back then, blogging was a lot closer to what Twitter is today, which is probably the most striking difference in the form between now and the early days. Remember there were no (or very few) inline commenting systems in the early blogosphere – so to comment on another blog, you had to write your own post on your own site and link back to the original post hoping that its author would notice. So – essentially the @username and RT functions in Twitter were then the state of the art in blogs as well.

Almost coincident with the tenth anniversary of mikel.org was the news (via Metafilter, where I’ve been a member for almost a decade as well) that another early blogger, Brad Graham, has died. I remember The Bradlands very very well, and although Brad and I never met (& I never have gone to SXSW, where many of the early bloggers first met), his passing brings a profound sense of loss. It’s the loss of a friend to many – but even to those of us who didn’t know him but were active in that era, he was a key member of the early community of bloggers, when it was possible to still discuss a “community of bloggers”.

Hey look at this: Seb’s Open Research is back on the air! Or should I say, on the wire? If (by chance) you still read here (and I haven’t exactly been the most prolific blogger in the last while either) and are NOT aware of Sebastien and his blog, I strongly recommend that you click as quickly as you can and check it out. Seb is one of those guys who keeps a relatively low profile compared to the “stars” – but who has a huge and entirely deserved (in my experience) reputation among the long-standing and most perceptive thinkers in the strange space described by terms as “social” and “web” and such.

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