January 8, 2008

• A Brief History of Nothing in Particular

  Warning: Unless you’re at least part nerd, this will probably bore you to tears.
  
  Some of you may have noticed that “things” are starting to appear in the right column of this page.
  
  For lack of a better expression, I suppose I’d say that it’s part of my efforts to “go global” with various aspects of my writing. Of course, everything on the 3xdubya is “global,” but a large part of having an impact (and ultimately, making a living) as a writer on the web has to do with “visibility.” Personally, I’ve never been much for the self-marketing gig– I find it the least appealing part of the writing life. It’s odd to hear myself say that, given that I used to work in industries related to sales, marketing and advertising.
  
  Many of those of us who write online started “in print.” Writing online was “coincidental,” in some way. It was certainly not ever perceived as a commercial opportunity. At least this seems true for those who have been doing this “virtual life” thing for a long time.
  
  As best my memory serves me, I started my life on the Internet as a number on (then) state-of-art Internet service provider CompuServe in 1993, or maybe it was 1994.
  
  Well…
  
  That’s not entirely true. When I was in college (early 80′s) my friend Sam Jones had a Tandy TRS-80 (fondly known as the “Trash 80″) home computer, a dial-up modem and was part of something known as MicroNet which was akin to the ham radio version of early Internet communications. At a later date, he even ended up as a “SysOp” on a BBS system. (Give yourself 10 bonus points for knowing what a BBS is, 25 points for knowing what a SysOp is, and 100 points if you remember MicroNet)
  
  But I’m digressing into a rabbit hole of deep nerddom.
  
  Compuserve seemed like “state of the art,” at the time. People were identified by their IDs which were something like “45628.7601.” Very exciting, I know.
  
  From a techno-anthropoligical standpoint, I believe the primary reason most people who started accessing the web during those years are so comfortable with the idea of communicating with “strangers” online is that what we had back then was primarily FORUMS. “Web sites” were a relative rarity, reserved for corporate giants like Sony, IBM or RCA. What we “did” online was participate interest group discussions based around some common interest. I belonged to forums for people who played golf, collected stamps, were interested in fountain pens, studied Jungian psychology, and so forth. Mostly we marveled at the fact that we suddenly had 24/7 access, from our living rooms, to group activities that previously required joining clubs, extensive travel and planning, if they were even possible.
  
  To this day, I continue to be part of a lot of different web forums, although I really do like the flexibility of the blogging format.
  
  Odd trivia: Although most people have probably not even heard of CompuServe, because they have long since been “absorbed” by other services, the fact that you folks can format your blog fonts with colors and sizes, as well use smileys, originally came from early CS features.
  
  Denmarkguy was “born” on July 20th, 1995. Some people change usernames as often as the weather; this one has stuck ever since. There’s no great “plan” or “romance” behind the name… I’d gotten tired of being “a number” on CompuServe and AOL had the one thing most other aspiring Internet services didn’t: A usability department; those nerds who spend their lives getting your computer experience to intuitively “make sense” rather than be a mystery. So I changed services, and came up with the current alias because I needed a 10-letter username that wasn’t my name. I’m from Denmark. I’m a guy. Big whoop.
  
  My first blog was called “Shades of Grey” and started in 1999. It wasn’t even a blog– I actually went to the trouble of updating and archiving the front page stories on a static web site, every few days. It was the biggest mess, and the biggest pain in the rear you can imagine.
  
  Anyways, even though I categorically refuse to make New Year’s resolutions, I have been a rather busy bee for the past few weeks, as part of “tidying up” the extensive trail of “bread crumbs” I have left behind on the whirled wide web. They weren’t originally there because of my love of writing, but their “old” purpose has been served and it occurred to me that I might be able to do something more useful with them.
  
  As many of you know, I have long been rather active in the worldwide “community” of HSPs, and much of my writing also happens to be on that particular topic. In general, 90% of my writing is non-fiction– I’m possibly the world’s most inept poet, and I have gradually come to agree with my college creative writing professor who joked that I was “technically adept at creating the world’s most boring characters.” So I guess I’m going to stick with the non-fiction angle.
  
  This past week, I have been giving my oldest blog– HSP Notes– a bit of a face lift and update; If you happen to be an HSP, or just curious about what else I write, do stop by and give me a shout. Well. Leave a comment, or subscribe, or something. Whatever. Anyway, that blog is just a tiny corner of the writing I am trying to bring together into a more cohesive whole. I have more than 40 articles on various topics in psychology and metaphysics, and an almost equal number on various aspects of HSP life.
  
  And that’s ultimately why “things” have started to appear in the right-hand column. Feel free to click on them and see what happens… maybe you’re a bit like me and have actually been using some of these services and aggregators for a while to find stuff, without wondering how that “stuff” was made available to you, in the first place. Of course, I’m supposed to be working, and instead I end up surfing around social bookmarking sites, looking at what others are writing…
  
  Ain’t life grand?
  

  • 12:34 am
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