I have had two columns published in hard copy where people pay for subscriptions...for free. So I guess I am starting off on neutral ground-not paying to be printed, nor receiving compensation.
I have been blogging for years and years. I started off with yahoo 360 under a different user name. I was all over yahoo back in the day-late 2004/early 2005, primarily as a regular in one of the top science chat rooms.
I haven't been in a chat room in years, but the way the old yahoo rooms worked, thirty users could intereact live. We could have different types of font, colors, sizes, so as comments came up on the screen in list fashion, it was easy to see which user was posting by their fonts. Very often two or three conversations would be happening at the same time, interspersed with random spam posts and people coming and going were noted in small red font in between the live posts.
There was a room list to the side that showed everyone in the room, and you could click on one of those names and it would open up a new window where you could have a private conversation with that person.
Sometimes you could get kicked out. Folks also had the opportunity to block certain posters. Things would really get hopping on the weekends...the screen going so fast it was hard to keep up, nevermind monitoring the three private conversations you might have going.
We talked about everything-mostly current affairs. I remember The last Bush running for re election mentioning chat rooms in a speech-he said it awkwardly . I can't remember the exact wording but it was clear he had never been in a chat room. But he referred to them as public opinion on a certain matter.
Well, it was also about that time that we started to lose rights to peacably assemble, and freedom of speech, due to the passage of an act that pretended it was all in our best interests.
The chat room was systematically shut down. Someone using multiple computers, or computers they hacked, to fill the chat room up with clones. Like, "Sillyrobot1" "Sillyrobot2" and so on. No attempt was made to hide the cloning. Two or three of the thirty slots were alsways occupied by duds, or observers, who never said anything, but then the cloning started. If you were lucky enough to be able to get in the room, one or two regs might have squeezed in as well, really limiting the conversation.
So we moved on to another room by passing the word along. Then the clones moved in that room. We had crashed three rooms by the time I gave up. I had started blogging with 360 and kept that up until they closed THAT down. They supposedly gave use the opportunity to migrate our blogs to another yahoo platform-our profile, I think-but only one of two of my blogs migrated. The primary really outspoken one vanished. I was getting several hundred pageviews a day back then.
I don't keep copies of my posts-hopefully I keep the original photos somewhere.
I got mad at yahoo and migrated the remaining blog over to multiply. Shutting 360 really split us up- I had a lot of good pals blogging around the world and we all went different directions. I tried multiply and didn't like it, so I started up a new blog here on blogger, this one. I recently went back to read my blog that moved to multiply-I hadn't been there in years, and found out it's gone. All of multiply is no more. They probably sent a notice to my old yahoo email.
Now I have found a quasi solution to things that disappear on the intenet. Managing to get published in hard copy with a small circulation. Maybe somewhere 100 years from now someone will be replacing the floor on an old house and find my column spread out as an underlayment. Or maybe, once my head shot is added, my column might find it's way as a puppy toilet. More than likely, it will go up in a cloud of fire and smoke up someone's chimney-but at least it will leave a trace of it's demise, unlike publishing on the interent, where things just seems to vanish without a trace.
I have been blogging for years and years. I started off with yahoo 360 under a different user name. I was all over yahoo back in the day-late 2004/early 2005, primarily as a regular in one of the top science chat rooms.
I haven't been in a chat room in years, but the way the old yahoo rooms worked, thirty users could intereact live. We could have different types of font, colors, sizes, so as comments came up on the screen in list fashion, it was easy to see which user was posting by their fonts. Very often two or three conversations would be happening at the same time, interspersed with random spam posts and people coming and going were noted in small red font in between the live posts.
There was a room list to the side that showed everyone in the room, and you could click on one of those names and it would open up a new window where you could have a private conversation with that person.
Sometimes you could get kicked out. Folks also had the opportunity to block certain posters. Things would really get hopping on the weekends...the screen going so fast it was hard to keep up, nevermind monitoring the three private conversations you might have going.
We talked about everything-mostly current affairs. I remember The last Bush running for re election mentioning chat rooms in a speech-he said it awkwardly . I can't remember the exact wording but it was clear he had never been in a chat room. But he referred to them as public opinion on a certain matter.
Well, it was also about that time that we started to lose rights to peacably assemble, and freedom of speech, due to the passage of an act that pretended it was all in our best interests.
The chat room was systematically shut down. Someone using multiple computers, or computers they hacked, to fill the chat room up with clones. Like, "Sillyrobot1" "Sillyrobot2" and so on. No attempt was made to hide the cloning. Two or three of the thirty slots were alsways occupied by duds, or observers, who never said anything, but then the cloning started. If you were lucky enough to be able to get in the room, one or two regs might have squeezed in as well, really limiting the conversation.
So we moved on to another room by passing the word along. Then the clones moved in that room. We had crashed three rooms by the time I gave up. I had started blogging with 360 and kept that up until they closed THAT down. They supposedly gave use the opportunity to migrate our blogs to another yahoo platform-our profile, I think-but only one of two of my blogs migrated. The primary really outspoken one vanished. I was getting several hundred pageviews a day back then.
I don't keep copies of my posts-hopefully I keep the original photos somewhere.
I got mad at yahoo and migrated the remaining blog over to multiply. Shutting 360 really split us up- I had a lot of good pals blogging around the world and we all went different directions. I tried multiply and didn't like it, so I started up a new blog here on blogger, this one. I recently went back to read my blog that moved to multiply-I hadn't been there in years, and found out it's gone. All of multiply is no more. They probably sent a notice to my old yahoo email.
Now I have found a quasi solution to things that disappear on the intenet. Managing to get published in hard copy with a small circulation. Maybe somewhere 100 years from now someone will be replacing the floor on an old house and find my column spread out as an underlayment. Or maybe, once my head shot is added, my column might find it's way as a puppy toilet. More than likely, it will go up in a cloud of fire and smoke up someone's chimney-but at least it will leave a trace of it's demise, unlike publishing on the interent, where things just seems to vanish without a trace.
