Bloggers on Blogging -- Webby

Webby writes on Blogging

From late 1996 I've been online. In approximately ten years I've seen various occurrences come and go. In the beginning it was the web chat. I think we were just so happy just over the fact that we were connected so it was like growing up together.

Along came the instant messengers..first it was ICQ then Yahoo and MSN Messengers and so on. There were, still are, GROUPS...various interest groups..they are still alive, email will always be alive of course.

The first blog site I ever laid eyes on was LiveJournal and that was probably 1998. I was (am) always curious about everything new when it came to the internet -- tried to keep myself abreast of what was going on in many fields but that has become too overwhelming now. Anyways, I signed up for LiveJournal and that was my first blog.

I wrote for a while...like a personal diary and nothing much came out of that. At this stage of my internet experience I had not yet gotten the sense of social networking or what it was all about, really.

Next thing I came across was Blogger.com. I did the same thing there and then I paid a little more attention to it when Google bought Blogger. It was actually thanks to Blogger I came got my first Gmail account.

Still I had not gotten the hang of it. I wrote and I wrote without anybody noticing that.

I'd been signed up for, first Geocities, later Yahoo...kept my email accounts in Yahoo, kept track of what new stuff they were bringing out all the time so when I read about Y360°, of course I was curious.

I registered for a Y360 page, looked around a little...saw that I could make my own HTML-coding etc... nothing much different from the other blog sites I'd been using. For some reason (that I cannot really remember), I joined a Yahoo group called Y-360 help group, got three friends on my Y360 list and I still remember when I got the first comment!

That had never happened with any of the other blog sites I mentioned and it made all the difference. Someone was actually reading my little posts. My friends list grew immensely for a while there, even though I tried to be careful about who to add and who not.

My blog never had a theme...I never had to limit myself to any certain subject...I just kept journaling about my new life in Canada, my old life back home in Sweden, our cat, ducks, raccoons or just whatever that happened to be on my mind.

One of my newly won friends in Y360 introduced me to a graphics editor named Paint Shop Pro...a programme that had been sitting on my computer for ages but I never understood how to use. Suddenly I got the hang of that and a new world opened! I learned new things about myself, that I have a love for shapes and colours that I had no idea of before.

During these two years I've been blogging on Y360° I've sometimes wondered if this was just another thing that would fade away just like for example the early web chat. I don't know, but I don't think so.

When you consider the amount of users in all the various blog sites..MySpace, Blogger, TypePad, WordPress...you name it... I just don't think it will go away. Social networking has become too big...much bigger than I honestly think Yahoo was aware of when they started Y360°. They had a really good thing going...a place where you actually got a sense of community, but I think it needs a lot of work to live up to the others.

I sometimes have this feeling that they don't really know where they're heading...in which direction, so to speak, and I sometimes wonder whether they're going to keep up Y360° at all. I'm no expert on the subject...absolutely not...but I don't have any real sense of integration between the Yahoo services.