One Year On: 1-Year Anniversary of ReadWriteWeb

This post as it looked in 2004.

Here goes another self-referencing post about blogging. A couple of days ago I clocked up 1 year on this weblog, having started Read/Write Web on 20 April 2003, with an introductory essay called (of course) The Read/Write Web. Looking back on the past 12 months, I have to say that weblogging has done me a world of good. It's been my creative outlet, it woke up my previously-dormant writing genes, I've met a lot of interesting people, my critical thinking has improved and my INTJ imagination has prospered.

Pre-History

Actually my weblogging efforts started more than 2 years ago, in a short-lived weblog called Modern Web. I was just getting into reading blogs at that point — Dave Winer's Scripting News was one of the first weblogs I read on a regular basis, also a New Zealand site called Aardvark. I soon enough discovered that Dave Winer had created a weblogging tool called Radio Userland. So at some stage in March 2002 I downloaded Radio Userland and began to experiment with this new (to me) web publishing form.

I should mention that I wasn't a newbie in terms of web publishing, as I'd developed a football picks website in the late-90's. It was a dynamic site too, developed using ASP and an Access database. But after a couple of years I gave up the football picks website, because I wanted to do something involving writing. 21 March 2002 was the day I published my first "post" in my new Radio Userland weblog.

My first blog post in Radio Userland in 2002, pre-RWW.

In those early days I was experimenting and mostly used Modern Web to store quotes and links. I did the occasional paragraph of original thought, but in retrospect not nearly enough. My About Me page in this first incarnation of my weblog described my blogging as "an informal commentary". That is, I was commenting on other peoples content and not truly creating my own content.

I abandoned this first weblog attempt on 31 May 2002 — a little over two months after I started. Something wasn't clicking.

Read/Write Web is Born

A year later, when my Radio Userland license came up for renewal — I decided to give blogging another go. But this time I was determined to use it to write original content. After a bit of thinking, I eventually decided on "Read/Write Web" as the name for my new weblog. I was influenced by Dave Winer's Two-Way Web theory and accompanying website. Also by Anil Dash's Microcontent Client essay, the Chandler open source PIM (Personal Information Management) project, "next-gen websites" (as I was calling them back then), counterpoint music, XML technologies, and much more. When I was making notes for a domain name to buy, I noted that read/write means:

"capable of being displayed (read) and modified (written to)" — Webopedia

It was perfect. I bought the domain name and then began to write.

ReadWriteWeb homepage, 5 June 2003 (the earliest Wayback Machine copy).

Highlights Over Past 12 Months

April 2003: My inaugural post was titled The Read/Write Web. It outlined the manifesto I've promoted ever since then: the Web should be read/write, not read-only.

My third post, RSS - Subscribing to Topics, began my fascination with topic-mapping in blogging.

May 2003: Web browsers were a hot topic for me during this month — browser/editors (as Tim Berners-Lee originally wanted them to be) and the future of IE.

June 2003: I wrote a series of articles on The Universal Canvas.

July 2003: My first link from an A-List blogger, Clay Shirky, came from this article: Weblogs should be topic-first, not author-first.

Also in July, I coined the phrase Web of Ideas. It conveys a huge part of what the Web means to me — to "discover, create and share ideas". I later used this as the title of, and modus operandi for, my linkblog. I wrote a follow-up piece: Web of Ideas II.

August 2003: Two of my favourite posts from the past year are art/technology mixes: In XML did Kubla Khan - XML as Literature and The Whiteness of the Whale - the Semantic Web. I enjoyed writing these, as they're a blend of my Arty background (I'm an English Lit major) and my techy bent. I must write more like this...

ReadWriteWeb domain goes live, August 2003.

Later in August, I wrote up an idea called Microcontent Wiki. It was about how to track a conversation that occurs in the comments on someone else's weblog.

September 2003: I converted to a CSS-based layout using XHTML.

On 30 September I got my first link from Dave Winer, which was a big deal to me because he's been a big influence on my read/write philosophy.

October 2003: My post titled Select Mode: Publisher best represents this month for me. There was a "broadcasting vs conversation" meme going around at the time and the point I was trying to make was that I use my weblog first and foremost as a publishing medium.

November 2003: Inspired by Erik Benson, I signed up for Nanowrimo — an annual contest where participants have to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. I proceeded to bore my readers witless throughout November with updates from my novel. However, Nanowrimo was a fantastic experience for me. It was bloody hard work, but to actually complete a novel was a big thrill.

December 2003: Apart from recovering from Nanowrimo, I wrote a few posts on weblog ontologies and taxonomies.

January 2004: I came up with a concept called The Fractal Blogosphere. Inspired by Sir Tim Berners-Lee's Fractal Web theory, it was a proposal for an alternative measurement of blogging to the Power Law. It got quite a bit of coverage in the blogosphere.

February 2004: I got all excited by the possibilites of Information Flow as a kind of bottom-up Knowledge Management.

March 2004: My most successful post yet, an interview with Marc Canter. It got Slashdotted, which caused a big spike in hits. But most importantly, it showed I have what it takes to be an 'amateur journalist'. Now I've just got to work out how to get paid for doing it ;-)

The Future

Content-wise, I can't predict what the future of Read/Write Web holds. That's what makes blogging so exciting! But there may be changes in infrastructure. I'm working on a re-design, with a new CSS layout and possibly a new weblog authoring tool (Movable Type). Stay tuned.

Originally published on my tech blog ReadWriteWeb, which ran from 2003-2012. Replanted on Cybercultural in September 2025.