501-600: Drama in Bloggerland
Get ready. Get set. Get:
Microsoft suckers Matt
Matt plays Slashdot mod
The Matt Dabrowski Saga
Not going to dig into it right now, but I think it'd make a good refi post of its own—early active mefite teenager (and inveterate self-linker) geek gets into trouble, etc.
This post features an appearance by the father of one of the principle players, even. Exciting!
An early candidate for [more inside]
"kottkefilter" speculation
It's a whole thread of kottke talking about Matt talking about kottke, and basically bloggers calling themselves dorks, and in one comment Matt claims this is the first thread to have broken 10 comments. Was he right, at that moment at least?
Matt vs. script kiddies
More administrative stuff on the front page, pre-Metatalk.
no seriously napster is awesome
kitten-chucking at unamerican.com
pinko commie web design
chatfilter (and another great big post)
Matt suggests voice synth gutenberg radio
And no one responds. God, I have days like that.
A terrible post!
At least, in retrospect. No explanation, just a link to a url (www.word.com) with the text "I smell a lawsuit." Did it make sense at the time? Probably. Maybe. I wasn't there. The contents of www.word.com are, at this point, far from contentious.
So that's interesting. Would this post fly on mefi today? Should the durability of a post in the long run be a consideration when posting? Over how long of a run?
Does anybody know what was interesting about word.com in early 2000?
There might've been a comment editor!
Matt willfully doubleposts
Mad props from CoolSTOP
Matt can ollie a foot high
More Bloggy Drama!
Bygone: font colors
Bush and Gore
Death to DoubleClick
And what was this about a marketing scare, Matt?
domain dispute drama
Matt talks about MeFi's growth
Item: proposed moderation for link posting!
Item: default was 7 days of posts on the front page. 7 days! On contemporary Mefi, that'd be something like 300-400 posts to scroll through. Wow.
Item: proposed karma and comment moderation!
Item: again with proposed comment editing!
Mefi was getting 1,000 page views a day as of January 26, 2000. It was also, bear in mind, crazy silly fresh.
dangerman makes a prescient declaration about what makes Metafilter work. (And dings kottke.)
And kottke speaks up: 50 posts a day (just a fever-dream at the time; now a MeFi reality) is Too Many. Site style will shift over time as the userbase grows. And he signs his post. And in a followup comment, he predicts increasing snark ("bitterness or crankiness", specifically) and the appearance of an agenda as the site grows.
According to vitaminb, "you can have popular weblog or an uncensored weblog, but not both." Which is a good line, but may not really hold up. How do you define "uncensored?" Contemporary MeFi sees occasional comment and post deletions, but does not have the transparent feel of Moderation seen on, say, Slashdot. Where is the line, and just how wide and gray and fuzzy is it?
More MeFi press
Another self-link!
log spam a new thing?
I hear "log spam" and think of the junk that shows up daily in my referrer logs—it looks like prolific meant it as "web log spam": the receipt of email from a blogger requesting that you check out his site. The instance quoted is actually, to my modern sensibilities, quaint beyond belief, but apparently it was jarring in 2000.
Plus: more appearances by old A-listers. Blog drama!
no one uses HTML anymore lol
administrative stuff: preferences improved!
No Metatalk yet, so Matt posts site news on the front page. What's this "floating menu" stuff he's talking about? Also, apparently karma was impending. Never did materialize [aside: thank god], though as of June '06 Matt has been mentioning a thumbs up/down idea...
MozillaFilter
Genesis of "no self-links"!
What would by today's standards be an incredibly shitty post. Back then...well, it was apparently an incredibly shitty post.
Read the historic comment. The phrase "self-links" was still apparently uncoined—Matt refers to "self-promotional links", a wordier option that collapses rather nicely to the current lingo—and there was a 24-hour waiting period. (These days it's, what, a week, plus a few mandatory comments?) Also: No Marketing Crap. Pepsi Blue was still a glint in a soda exec's eye, but Matt was laying down the law.
Note also his deployment of the phrase "self-policing". Is that a first?
Also, CrazyUncleJoe calls kottke "Mr. Cranky Pants".
And it's technically out of bounds, being at thread 602, but there's a shameless (though slightly more artful) selflink that same morning.
501-600
Microsoft suckers Matt
Matt plays Slashdot mod
The Matt Dabrowski Saga
Not going to dig into it right now, but I think it'd make a good refi post of its own—early active mefite teenager (and inveterate self-linker) geek gets into trouble, etc.
This post features an appearance by the father of one of the principle players, even. Exciting!
An early candidate for [more inside]
"kottkefilter" speculation
It's a whole thread of kottke talking about Matt talking about kottke, and basically bloggers calling themselves dorks, and in one comment Matt claims this is the first thread to have broken 10 comments. Was he right, at that moment at least?
Matt vs. script kiddies
More administrative stuff on the front page, pre-Metatalk.
no seriously napster is awesome
kitten-chucking at unamerican.com
pinko commie web design
chatfilter (and another great big post)
Matt suggests voice synth gutenberg radio
And no one responds. God, I have days like that.
A terrible post!
At least, in retrospect. No explanation, just a link to a url (www.word.com) with the text "I smell a lawsuit." Did it make sense at the time? Probably. Maybe. I wasn't there. The contents of www.word.com are, at this point, far from contentious.
So that's interesting. Would this post fly on mefi today? Should the durability of a post in the long run be a consideration when posting? Over how long of a run?
Does anybody know what was interesting about word.com in early 2000?
There might've been a comment editor!
Matt willfully doubleposts
Mad props from CoolSTOP
Matt can ollie a foot high
More Bloggy Drama!
Bygone: font colors
Bush and Gore
Death to DoubleClick
And what was this about a marketing scare, Matt?
domain dispute drama
Matt talks about MeFi's growth
Item: proposed moderation for link posting!
Item: default was 7 days of posts on the front page. 7 days! On contemporary Mefi, that'd be something like 300-400 posts to scroll through. Wow.
Item: proposed karma and comment moderation!
Item: again with proposed comment editing!
Mefi was getting 1,000 page views a day as of January 26, 2000. It was also, bear in mind, crazy silly fresh.
dangerman makes a prescient declaration about what makes Metafilter work. (And dings kottke.)
And kottke speaks up: 50 posts a day (just a fever-dream at the time; now a MeFi reality) is Too Many. Site style will shift over time as the userbase grows. And he signs his post. And in a followup comment, he predicts increasing snark ("bitterness or crankiness", specifically) and the appearance of an agenda as the site grows.
According to vitaminb, "you can have popular weblog or an uncensored weblog, but not both." Which is a good line, but may not really hold up. How do you define "uncensored?" Contemporary MeFi sees occasional comment and post deletions, but does not have the transparent feel of Moderation seen on, say, Slashdot. Where is the line, and just how wide and gray and fuzzy is it?
More MeFi press
Another self-link!
log spam a new thing?
I hear "log spam" and think of the junk that shows up daily in my referrer logs—it looks like prolific meant it as "web log spam": the receipt of email from a blogger requesting that you check out his site. The instance quoted is actually, to my modern sensibilities, quaint beyond belief, but apparently it was jarring in 2000.
Plus: more appearances by old A-listers. Blog drama!
no one uses HTML anymore lol
administrative stuff: preferences improved!
No Metatalk yet, so Matt posts site news on the front page. What's this "floating menu" stuff he's talking about? Also, apparently karma was impending. Never did materialize [aside: thank god], though as of June '06 Matt has been mentioning a thumbs up/down idea...
MozillaFilter
Genesis of "no self-links"!
What would by today's standards be an incredibly shitty post. Back then...well, it was apparently an incredibly shitty post.
Read the historic comment. The phrase "self-links" was still apparently uncoined—Matt refers to "self-promotional links", a wordier option that collapses rather nicely to the current lingo—and there was a 24-hour waiting period. (These days it's, what, a week, plus a few mandatory comments?) Also: No Marketing Crap. Pepsi Blue was still a glint in a soda exec's eye, but Matt was laying down the law.
Note also his deployment of the phrase "self-policing". Is that a first?
Also, CrazyUncleJoe calls kottke "Mr. Cranky Pants".
And it's technically out of bounds, being at thread 602, but there's a shameless (though slightly more artful) selflink that same morning.
posted by cortex at 2:13 PM
2 Comments:
Re: word.com, it looks like they stole Yahoo's design.
Ah ha! Thanks for doing the legwork, plutor.
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