About

I am a 40-something webhead and author from Amsterdam, The Netherlands. In my spare time I run gavinfriday.com, U2log.com and whedonesque.com. I didn’t know I was this geeky until I discovered the online world through my office’s 2400 baud modem back in ’93.

I started ‘weblogging’ late ’98 or early ’99, before I knew what it was, at another domain I owned. My favourite website at the time was Jeffrey Zeldman’s daily report, a site I had read every day almost since its conception. On my own personal site at the time, I started out imitating what Zeldman did: link to cool stuff I found the web.

When weblogging took off among the – tiny group of – technorati around October 1999, I jumped on the bandwagon, got a Pyra account and signed up for the Blogger beta. I moved to prolific.org, a domain which I’d owned for a while and didn’t know what to do with, other than subletting it to my ‘music and memories’ site croon.org

For a while I was the only European weblogger to write in English, so quite quickly I became part of the earliest group of so-called ‘A-list’ webloggers there was, when world wide there were perhaps 500 weblogs. This is still reflected in the results you get on Google when you search for sites ‘similar to www.prolific.org’. Among the results you’ll find four ex-Pyrites, creators of Blogger.com. *)

Fame, or rather ‘traffic’, didn’t last long. Others, many, many others, followed, every year a new generation of webloggers arrived and every year more mainstream magazines and newspapers would claim ‘weblogging’ was the next big thing. Now we’re at the point where the words ‘weblog’ and ‘blog’ don’t even seem to mean what we thought they meant anymore.

Although my traffic has dwindled to a mere trickle of loyal readers, and I’m not even C-list anymore, I can look back and state with measured pride that I was present at the birth of the permalink (see also).

Although I’ve switched domains and have used many different tools to publish this site (handcoded, Blogger, Greymatter, Movable Type, WordPress, Pivot), I have never taken a break or indulged in a dramatic exit from from blogging. I’m nothing if not consistent.

Prolific.org is a hybrid weblog, with links and commentary and diary-type entries. I’m mostly interested in pop culture and the arts, as well as technology and (new) media. I write somewhat anonymously, but most of my regular readers know my name and if you follow the links to Flickr.com, I’m sure you’ll find pictures of me.

*) Google search on ‘sites similar to prolific.org’:

1. linkmachinego.com
2. textism.com
3. captainfez.com
4. powazek.com
5. projectme.com
6. megnut.com
7. acerbia.com
8. sixdifferentways.com
9. brainsluice.com
10. 7nights.com
11. queso.com
12. benhammersley.com
13. bluishorange.com
14. pyra.com
15. francisstrand.blogspot.com
16. interconnected.org
17. pixeldiva.co.uk
18. peterme.com
19. kitschbitch.com
20. onfocus.com
21. parallaxview.nu
22. a.wholelottanothing.org