Six years. Happy blogaversary.
Over the blog hill, I would assume, but I recently
learned from another blogger that the first Internet journal appeared fifteen years ago in
1994. I have a long way to catch up.
My first entry appeared far too long for the guy who introduced me to MindSay. He had established his account as one of the one-hundred series bloggers. I was blogger number two hundred forty-two. The numbers have since vanished, but I still remember mine from when MindSay used the LiveJournal (LJ) platform. Looking back on the
entry... it actually
does look too long for an introduction.
But I did not care! This new "blog" space was intended just for me, and I had my small tight-knit network of two blogging friends that included this gentleman who exposed me to my six-year addiction & one of his friends. I searched for other users, and I was able to find
verd & beloved
Ms. Lo among us veterans. My small audience was perfect at the time. I was able to blog with unabashed solipsism free of any criticism.
After several weeks of virtual anonymity here on MindSay, waves of cliques & droves of teens flocked to my new blogging home. It was only a few years later that I would find out that MindSay really had not yet opened for business at the time that I joined. In any event, I did not know if my small tight-knit network of two blogging friends & I would fit into the new crowd.
Weeks later, my two friends left.
By this point, however, I had befriended some of these eccentric cliques, like
Kynthiae, & Tennessee teens, like
Hannah. The influx was something like a new generation of bloggers. These bloggers, clearly familiar with the LJ format, had amazing layouts. In fact, they had some amazing entries too. They had this journal thing down to an art, but what made MindSay special was its AIMbot tool to update & its use of channels to meet like-minded bloggers. No wonder MindSay attracted this new generation. During this era, I learned that the best communication with these new bloggers was via reply rather than by writing entries.
Maybe two years passed, and our fearless leaders, Brian & Adam, readied MindSay for a new direction. Versions 1 & 2 of MindSay utilised the LJ platform. Version 3 was MindSay's break from the established format to a new rich text editor with layout templates. Channels disappeared, and the AIMbot tool became obsolete.
So rigid was our creativity that several users left mercilessly altogether.
Focus from blogs eventually shifted to the community. How many more pictures could a user upload for a header image? No longer could we hide portions of our entries behind "cut-tags", and our user images remained frozen. Animated avatars are like a novelty these days. With this new sentiment on MindSay, in poured a new generation of bloggers like
Mycki &
Shiny. Instead of the edgy, young crowd from the last wave, an older, more mature crowd borne into a blogging site focused primarily on the community ultimately re-grounded me to my initial narcissistic point of blogging. The phenomenon had an opposite effect, and I retreated to my current Friends-Only blog to log all of my daily thoughts & events.
***Years later, I witnessed the rise & fall of such sites as MySpace & Friendster. I joined & left Friendster years ago because one of my
Grenobloise friends used it & left. I never joined the cluttered mess that was MySpace, and after several months of my friends urging me to sign up for a Facebook account, I finally gave in to the peer pressure about two months ago. I doubt I will ever join Twitter though. Facebook became my way to interact with others, and MindSay became my site to quietly vent, sometimes about the Facebook friends. Not that venting is necessarily bad under the name of Andreux, but I certainly talk about them often. Get-togethers, opinions, humourous anecdotes... all of it stored right here for six years.
But now I am seeing some bloggers talk about leaving MindSay, saying that the site is not what it used to be. What was MindSay? Was it a place for the community? Was it a stomping ground for dazzling HTML/CSS skills? Was it the small, humble site that only a few of us knew before the masses invaded with their extraordinary layouts & sophisticated groups?
MindSay for me was always what I made of it. When the teens flooded, the site was a scenester neighbourhood. When the mature crew arrived, I shaped up my blog. One of the simplest, most important lessons that I ever learned about blogging is that the author can make whatever they want of their space:
If he wants to criticise the government by way of political articles, then ravager can;
If she wants to post silly questionnaires & surveys, then Kristin can;
If she wants to document the highs & lows of love, then beccasays can;
If she wants to talk the worst shit possible, then Jayme can;
If he wants to exhibit the prose of amateur fiction, then TheMariner can;
If he wants to post just a picture, then yes, Kuya can;
And if he wants to talk about what to talk about on a blog, then damnit, I can. We can. We all can! There are simply no bounds to the insight within the minds of hundreds, thousands, possibly millions of writers wherever you are. We speak, we scream, we flirt, and we snitch. The fact remains that our voices keep MindSay alive.
And we can bring down a site by leaving too. We can render MindSay into nothing if we make it that way.
The exodus around this place has proven to be cyclical. It is almost a necessary evil for this place to flourish again. Once every two years, the masses threaten to vanish, possibly ushering in the next generation. I never look to the next generation. They always come to me as a surprise.
We control what happens, and when the control is lost, the sentiment falls to chaos. MindSay is not dead. Six years later, I can say that MindSay is more vibrant now than my small company of four friends in the beginning. Since the first day, MindSay has gradually grown to the chatter that we see today. I do not doubt that bloggers will leave, but to say that MindSay is different, I ask what could you expect? To say that MindSay is dead is a skewed vision of what this place is now. Like a living organism, MindSay will change, and the generations will continue to surprise me.
Dear Andreux,
I hope I do you justice.
Your loving author,
Andrew
Current Mood: Proud panda
Current Music: Fragma - "Toca's Miracle"
(Yeah, some LJ things never die)
mindsay
