The internet and blogging according to me...

When I flesh this out, I'm probably not going get everything right, but it's something on my mind. At least to get away from politics for a moment. I figure it'll be fun. Besides if it weren't for the internet how could you guys see my work here.

The first time I heard of this thing called the internet when probably when I heard about this new news network, MSNBC. It was a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC. I guess somehow you could get to this internet you could go find stories and features at this place where MSNBC was on the internet.

I barely remember those early days. I'm not totally sure what the programming was like or even how they covered the news back then, and unfortunately I barely even watch the channel today. Though not too long ago I had a reason to watch. But the program I liked to watch the most was this show called The Site.

Hosted by Soledad O'Brien (she moved on to bigger and better things) and virtual reality guy who seems addicted to Starbuck's coffee (he was personable, but seemed very excitable for a guy addicted to Starbuck's coffee). Well we would see the virtual reality guy near the end of the show. Basically this show was about what was happening on the internet. The new sites and the new features. Perhaps it was away to learn more about this place since not many of us were there yet. I was going to be this new thing.

Almost seven years ago we got our first ISP account, through the old Ameritech company. It only lasted six month because my mother got tired of me tying up the phone line. Dial up seemed to be the only game in town in those days and not only that my mother didn't want to pay almost $20 for unlimited access. We had that plan which let us have the internet but for about a flat rate for at least 10 hours then maybe two or three dollars per hour beyond that. Alas I took more of a shine to the internet than she liked and that ended that experiment for a while.

One thing that impressed me was that through Ameritech we could design our own website. I never took advantage of that, but I though it was a cool feature. What would I put out there?

Well I never figured it out. It could have easily been a series of links to my favorite websites and that was all it could have been. Later on I developed better plans for what I would put out there. I figured a website or webpage had to be about me if I was to ever do one.

Either way I liked to surf personal websites over the years and I saw that there were many different types of sites with varying content. Some had pictures, biographies, & stories. Indeed there were some with hopes for the future, that is people with websites about running for president in the future. They started early didn't they.

Now I was trying to look at the history of blogging and I was looking at how it exploded on the scene of the internet. Blogging was around in the 90s, but probably not in the form we know it today. The service I use at this moment Blogger was created in 1999.

Today Blogging is popular. Unlike with websites back in the day with blogging you don't need to know some complicated codes unless you don't like how your blog look. Especially if you're making content, that is you're publishing on the internet your musings. With Blogger at least it doesn't take too much to post a photograph.

Today you can do more with a blog than post a photograph and write an essay of a paragraph or more. You can post some audio and some video. I discovered this not more than a year or so ago. People can do short films, comedy short, or even a serial and distribute them not on TV or in a movie theater, but online. And they can do it in blog form to.

Now that is one reason I'm on blogging today. I've been at this going on two years now and almost a couple of years before that, I saw Brain-Terminal.com post their first video and get some attention for it. The webmaster there Evan Coyne Maloney may not have been the first to do it, but this was the first time I had seen something with a purpose (something of a political documentary about a war protest) and then get some attention, mainly in right wing circles.

I was very impressed and it caused me to believe that this is how we all will take advantage of this new communications form. No longer are we just limited to text. We can create a short documentary and this doesn't have to be seen on TV or a cineplex but in the comfort of your own how all be it a computer screen.

There's more I'd like to write but for now I'll stop, maybe I'll add something extra to this in the future.