I spent the first three years of my life living in Ohio.
My law degree took three years to earn.
I've never even held a single job as long as half of three years.
It took me three years to work up the courage to ask Dineen to marry me.
And three years ago today, I wrote my first weblog entry. In the beginning, I would never have imagined many of the changes I would witness between then and now. The political, economic, and technological shifts are too numerous to list here. The web has changed, too - "weblog" and "blog" are now mainstream concepts, and having one isn't reserved for the geeks anymore. Weblogs have impacted the way we view the world, and the way that view is reported.
But the world has changed weblogging, too. Back when I started, the mere fact that one had a weblog was enough to form a common bond with the handful of others who also had one. Now, according to some recent numbers I've seen, a new Blogger page gets created once every minute and a half, let alone the thousands who use other weblog publishing tools. Weblogging is far more democratized, but far less cozy. I'm sure the orignal users of Usenet felt the same way at some point.
Weblogging has changed me, too. Before I began blogging, creating a web page was primarily a solitary activity - I would put something up, and tell a few people about it. They might look at the page once or twice, and that would be it. The site would sit, lonely and untouched for months. By weblogging, I was finally able to converse with others, and that has led me to meet some of the most fascinating people on the planet. (If you think you're one of these, you probably are. If I've ever linked to you, you probably are. If you've ever linked to me, well, consider yourself in the Pantheon.) And I've gotten drawn into their ideas, hopes, thoughts, dreams and disappointments just like they entered mine.
Cool.
I know the next three years will show me things that dwarf the changes of the last three years. I can guess at what a few of those things wil be; others I won't see until they smack me upside the head. There will be some good and some bad, and if I'm lucky the good will far outweigh the bad - just like it has for the last three years.
I can't wait.
Posted by wasylik at November 19, 2002 11:49 AM | TrackBack