[blogs] 25 Random Thoughts about 25 years of LinkMachineGo:

1. Does anybody remember E/N “Everything and Nothing” sites? And before E/N there were the early internet diarists and people like Justin Hall and Maggy Donea. Blogging before blogs.
2. I started LinkMachineGo because I looked at Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom Weblog and thought I could do something similar and focus on comics. I wasn’t as good as Jorn but lasted longer. (Jorn’s still active on Twitter.)
3. I have a very faint memory of the Saturday afternoon in 2000 I sat down and tried to pull together a Blogger template. I did not realise at the time what a life changing moment it was for me.
4. I was obsessed with Big Brother in the early 2000s!
5. There are some earlier LMG posts that I find in real poor taste. What was I thinking? I can’t bring myself to remove them.
6. I do miss classic long-form blog posts. There really was something slightly magical in that format / community of bloggers / moment in time.
7. There was a really exciting moment early on with blogging where it looked liked it would take over the internet. The Cambrian Explosion of Blogs. Then social media came along and all the exciting variety died off.
8. In the early years of blogging I always felt terribly old when I met other 20-something bloggers. I was thirty! lol.
9. I will never forget this Metafilter comment about 911 posted as it was happening. I remember looking at it not grasping the enormity of it.
10. The magic of the early years of blogging mostly ended when the warblogs came along during the Iraq War. Warbloging seems like patient zero for a lot of what went bad in social media later.
11. I often wonder how responsible blogs are for social media and everything that came out of it. So many of the different components of social media were trialed on blogs first and it seems unarguable that Mark Zuckerberg came out of the world of blogs.
12. I try not to think about all the time I’ve spent on blogging or how much I’ve spent on hosting LMG over the years.
13. Even though I have never blogged professionally I do wonder how much impact blogging has had on my working life. It’s hard to quantify but I do think it’s been a big benefit.
14. LinkMachineGo spawned Moment of Moore and The Evening Standard Headline Crisis. I got a tweet out of Alan Moore! :)
15. Three links that have stayed with me: Falling Man / The Sinking of the Estonia / Since 1979, Brian Murtagh has fought to keep convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald in prison
16. Essential late-stage blogging tools: Firefox. Newsblur RSS Reader, a bunch of bookmarklets (remember those?), some iOS Shortcuts, Notepad++, CLCL, Irfanview, Pinboard.in, WordPress.
17. I find it really hard to blog on a phone. Fat fingers and the eyesight is not what it was! :(
18. Favorite quote: “On page 39 of California Living magazine I found a hand-lettered ad from the McDonald’s Hamburger Corporation, one of Nixon’s big contributors in the ’72 presidential campaign: PRESS ON, it said. NOTHING IN THE WORLD CAN TAKE THE PLACE OF PERSISTENCE. TALENT WILL NOT: NOTHING IS MORE COMMON THAN UNSUCESSFUL MEN WITH TALENT. GENIUS WILL NOT: UNREWARDED GENIUS IS ALMOST A PROVERB. EDUCATION ALONE WILL NOT: THE WORLD IS FULL OF EDUCATED DERELICTS. PERSISTENCE AND DETERMINATION ALONE ARE OMNIPOTENT. I read it several times before I grasped the full meaning.”
19. When I die I’m pretty sure whoever eulogizes me is going to mention blogging. I’m okay with that.
20. I’ve published 9000+ posts which is nearly one-a-day over 25 years. Why do I sink so much time and effort into it? I definitely find the process of link blogging soothing. Maybe the simple answer is that I just wanted to record and categorise some of my web browsing.
21. I sometimes wonder what the blog in gestalt reveals about me. I’m not sure I want to find out.
22. I apologise if I’ve stolen a link, or posted something annoying or pissed you off over the years. I hope you can forgive me.
23. I’m pretty sure nobody is reading this anymore really. I’m doing it just for myself.
24. When I say blogging changed my life, I mean it. It really changed my life.
25. Ten thousand posts seems pretty achievable. Wish me luck! :)

25 Random Thoughts about 25 Years of LinkMachineGo

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2025 at 10:06 am and is filed under Blogs, LMG.

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