And then we were ten

Posted: July 30th, 2010 | Filed under: Various | Tags: birthday, blog, Blogging, u2, weblog | No Comments »

Reposted from U2log.com

Ten years ago, you hadn’t heard of blogging. It was before weblogs were even called blogs, before permalinks and Adsense, before people who have never run a community started calling themselves ‘social media experts’.

Maybe you weren’t even online back then. But we were and we were blogging. U2 were in the studio recording ‘All that you can’t leave behind’. They’d set up a webcam sending out pictures every few minutes. They’d built in a delay, because god forbid we’d see anything untoward. We were a small group of fans from Holland, Australia, USA and Sweden who had first met each other on IRC and then met up ‘in real life’ on the road during the Popmart tour in 1997. We were online 24/7, grabbing pics from the webcam and archiving them. We’d done the same during ‘Pop’. Back then occasionally there’d be some kind of response from the studio on our comments. Little messages posted on cardboard cutouts. It’s too long ago to remember the details. But it was fun. It could have been the start of a beautiful band-fan relationshop online. But U2 never really did take to the internet like we – early adopters – hoped they would.

U2log.com was one of the first ever blogs, one of the first ever single subject blogs, one of the first ever team blogs. (Hi team! How are you all these days?) I’m proud of that. Ahead of the curve means you’ll suffer the dialectics of progress at some point. We did satire, we did proper reporting, we tried to filter fact from fiction, we strived to be anti-agenda, independent, secular, different. We loved Pop^*.

We are past our prime, I’ll be the first to admit. I’ve been running U2log.com mostly on my own these past couple of years. I’m always on the verge of kicking it in the head. I’m not the fan I used to be and there are many reasons I shouldn’t be doing this: Other sites are doing it so much better. I know too much, I know too little. I have other interests I should focus on. Still, I can’t let it go. Yet.

U2log.com is ten years old today. There’s a tour about to start. One more for the road.

^* And screw the lads for being so insecure about that album. *grin*

Here be dragons

Posted: December 4th, 2006 | Filed under: Site | Tags: blog, Blogging, delicacies | 3 Comments »

Eachman kills the blog you know. Daily personal blogging takes place at VOX. Links, feeds and other delicacies continue to be served here.
Bring your own browser.

VOX popular

Posted: October 26th, 2006 | Filed under: Web | Tags: advertisement, best friends, Blogging, current design, dad, hub, mates, neighbourhood, notepad, privacy features, whirl | Comments Off

VOX, Six Apart’s new blogging tool, is now open to everyone. I’ve been using it for a couple of months now and (as you may have noticed) it’s made me forget about this here MT-powered self-made blog that I’ve had for the last 7 years. Why? Because I, like everybody else, have less time to spare and want everything to be quick and easy at this point in my life. Maybe when I retire I’ll go back to hand-coding my thoughts in Notepad, but right now, I want VOX.

Vox doesn’t do everything I want. I can’t import delicious, last.fm, upcoming, etc like I do here, but it does all the basics really well. But most importantly… all my mates are there in my own little neighbourhood! With it’s privacy features, it’s perfect for the easy, ‘secret’ blogging of stuff you want only your best friends and/or your family to read. It’s free, so give it a whirl, and invite your mates or maybe your techno-phobe dad.

Hmm, that came out like a copywritten advertisement. It’s not. Honest.

So what am I gonna do with eachman.com? Well, I’m thinking of reverting back to prolific.org and making this an aggregate-only hub. I think I’ll be stripping this site of its current ‘design’ soonish.

Back away from the keyboard

Posted: April 22nd, 2005 | Filed under: Web | Tags: Blogging, distinction, n00b, pedestrian, toes | Comments Off

Oh dear, oh dear. Never thought something as pedestrian as me not getting on with a piece of software would launch such debate (1, 2). We seem to have stepped on some toes. It’s enough to drive this n00b away from the tool and its l33t community. For the record, let me state what I like about WordPress: 1. PHP. Yes, because it’s fast. 2. Its distinction between posts and pages. 3. It’s free.But it’s not about code or tools or plugins. It’s about blogging.