Author: jess Page 12 of 65

It might not seem like that long ago to some of us, but the Internet of 2001 was an entirely different Internet from today’s. Social media was almost literally nonexistent. There was no Facebook, no Twitter, not even MySpace yet. There was no Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok. Forums existed, but there was no Reddit yet. YouTube was still four years out. Amazon was but a humble bookseller. Google had already pulled out to the front of the search engine pack, but was also still—at least nominally—trying to Not Be Evil.

Another major difference was that blogs had a lot more cachet in those days. I speak mainly of blogs that were on their own websites, though LiveJournal and Xanga added their own flavor to the online stew by bringing the concept to a less tech-savvy crowd, giving those who fancied themselves the stars of their own lives a spotlight to shine on themselves.1I once had a LiveJournal. It no longer exists. It was one of the first personal pages I ever purged from the Internet, if not the first, fearing the long-term ramifications of later discovery. This, I now realize, of course, was exactly as much an act of ego as assuming anyone cared about the minutiae of my day-to-day life in the first place. Still, there’s a halfway decent chance more people cared about that blog than this one. But a blog that was on its own website was a different animal. You weren’t yet able to do what I did, which was find a website that would accommodate your modest hosting needs, pay a year upfront to gain access to the WordPress suite, find a layout you like, maybe tweak it a bit, and start pounding out the words. You either had to build the thing yourself from the ground up, or have someone who could do that do it for you.

And in the almost incomprehensibly different world of 2001, that’s exactly what Wil Wheaton did.

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