Wednesday, May 2, 2001
"A Short History of a Dead Weblog"
by Lance Arthur
LanceLog2000! was born on May 17, 2000 and was put to sleep on May 1, 2001, making it not quite one full year old.
Admittedly, it began as a joke.
What I saw of Weblogs at the time were a series of mostly uninteresting self explorations of the mundane and/or links to other Weblogs that linked back in a vicious cycle of nothingness and noise.
Weblogging was being trumpeted as a revolution - by the Webloggers. To my eyes, it looked like the same old shit with a new shine on it, and I was frustrated and annoyed by it because I saw the revolution as a victim of its own ease of access.
By and large, Weblogs were being created using a new online tool called Blogger that made creating and maintaining quickly updatable sites ridiculously easy. But there also seemed to be an assumption on most people's parts that what everyone was already doing with their Weblog was all that could be done.
I saw Blogger as an extension of what the Web was capable of, the vast and unwieldy unleashing of creativity and individual discovery. And, perhaps, there was that happening too. But mostly the goal of every Weblog did not seem to be creativity and discovery and wit and bravery, but self-aggrandizement (something I can also be accused of) and navel-gazing and that endless link loop that was incredibly annoying because the pursuit of traffic became the end-all, be-all of Weblog creation.
So I created a Weblog that would have no links. At all. To anywhere.
As I began using Blogger, I was excited by the prospect of the ease of recording and archiving. It made it easier for me to explore different ways of writing, and exploring my own limitations and self-imposed fences. Because it was so easy to talk about literally anything that happened, I began to look for interesting things to write about.
Writing became fun again. I wrote in different styles. I broke my own rules. I had huge run-on sentences. I explored prose and language and broke out of the mold of "this has to be done this way." And, for myself and my goals, LanceLog was successful in spite of my low hopes for it.
But Blogger's limitations also became increasingly obvious. The archiving facility sucks. Sometimes the site would eat entries before they ever got to the page. Sometimes the site wasn't working at all. And the "Politics of Blogging" are ludicrous and silly. I wanted, less and less, to write things here. I wanted, more and more, my own power back.
Hence, the end of LanceLog.
LanceLog2000!
LanceLog2001!
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