I was there, and gone, long before you showed up.

The other afternoon, Kevin and I (and indirectly Cody and Josh) were talking about how we were blogging years before it was popular. Oddly enough, we quit before it was popular, too. I had VerpMart, and they had Krodami (I can't believe it's still available!) . Back then, we called it "rambling" or "ranting" or "whining," depending on the mood of the post. Nothing's changed but the name. In a strange twist of irony, Krodami is a mirror of a majority today's blogs. "How," you ask? Easy: "Krodami" is "I'm a Dork" spelled backwards. The difference is that we realized that we were dorks.

We also laughed in the face of early social networking, knowing full well that it would become a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Live Journal was but a foreshadowing of things to come.

The kicker is that we had to do all of this by hand. Nobody provided a free service that equipped us to whine. We had to build our own sites, and construct our own content managers in order to flood the web with our inanity. It took effort. World+dog+WebAccess can blog today. It wasn't so simple, then. You had to work to get your thoughts online. Money had to flow from your pockets in order to share your thoughts.

Blogging. We did it by hand, baby.