Yesterday was a special day for me... it was seven years ago last night that I entered the world of blogging through the creation of my Advogato account on May 10, 2000. I had meant to mark the occasion yesterday with a special post, but time just got away from me. I find it rather humerous to re-read parts of that first entry:
In any event, since it's after 9pm and I'm still here in the Linuxcare office in SF, I decided to join this experiment... let's see if I actually keep up with it.
Well, yes, I did "actually keep up with it" a wee bit. Actually, for pretty much four years... until the 5+ week server outage starting in May 2004 had me move over to LiveJournal, where I focused my writing until the beginning of this year when I broke my writing out across several blogs (including my LJ account).
Also amusing that I mention Cluetrain and also my first visit ever to Ottawa the previous week. Little did I know that Ottawa would very soon play a much larger role in my life! Yet so many other pieces of that entry far removed from my life today. And then this line:
Okay... my first diary entry... and a long one... typical... no one has ever praised me for my brevity!
Well, some thing don't change!
It's definitely been a long, strange trip... filled with lots of fascinating people and interesting changes...
Speaking of changes, I was pleased to see that Advogato successfully went through a change in management from Raph Levien to Steven Rainwater last fall. Here's an interesting series of articles showing a community going through change:
- Advogato is going offline (Raph)
- Advogato is (maybe not) going offline (Steven)
- Advogato is here to stay (Raph)
Reading through the comments is certainly an interesting way to see the passion of the community that began there and obviously still continues today. I'm thrilled it continues, as it continues to provide interesting articles, as well as a home for many who still write there. Steven is now actively improving the site (as shown in the status blog) and after remembering my password and logging in, I can see he's offered users some interesting new features.
One of those is the ability to syndicate other blog feeds there... and so perhaps what I will do is create a feed of the items in my various blogs tagged "opensource" and have that syndicated over there. We'll see.
If you've never visited Advogato, do check it out. It's obviously focused on the community of free software and open source developers, but along the way some of the "trust metric" work was quite intriguing. (And here, here and here are some fascinating posts about blog spam and how the site and community fought it off.)
P.S. Raph... should you stumble across this post, many thanks to you for hosting Advogato for so long and giving us all a first place to start blogging. And thanks to you, too, Steven, for picking up the torch and carrying it on.
