Three things, in brief:
- This blog is now a stonking seven years old. Although the archives on this site only(!) date back to April 2000, there were three months of postings prior to that powered by notepad and html, which are now forever lost to time, though I’m fairly sure that posterity will cope fine without them.
Blimey. Seven years, eh? Long time. Lot of wibble, there.
- At this time of year, some people’s thoughts turn to the Bloggies awards, as a way to recognise blogs, bloggers and blogging technologies for doing what they do anyway. Which is fine.
I mean, if you did it the whole year in the hope of winning a bloggie, there’d be something wrong with your priorities, I’d think, but if a community of peers want to nominally recognise and reward several amongst their own for doing something they do every day, passionately and without being motivated by awards then fine, I say.
- Which brings me to the shameless whoring portion of this post. See, as I mentioned above, this blog is seven, and has been going since January 2000. It’s not one of the best ones out there - and I always think there’s something pretty weird about saying “best” blog since blogging is so distributed and multifarious these days - and in fact, as it has been since the very beginning.
It’s not the most humourous blog out there (my vote goes - admittedly with great bias - to little.red.boat, my lovely sister, who makes me actually LOL on a daily basis), and it’s not about politics, food, technology, entertainment or anything else, particularly. When all this were fields, you see, blogs didn’t have to be about anything.
Anyway, I digress. The point is, that while others are much better qualified in the many categories on offer, this blog is at least old, in blog years (which are like dog years, I think).
So if you feel so inclined, and you’re going through the various bloggies categories anyway, then I’d encourage you to plonk my name in the Lifetime Achievement category - if only to demonstrate to the world that an achievement isn’t always being best or brightest or spangliest or sexiest or newest or most controversial, but it can also describe tenacity and commitment. And keeping up this level of wibbling for seven years is nothing if not tenacious.
Or, y’know, don’t.
Update: Someone who wishes to remain nameless (thanks) mailed me to say that blogging in itself wasn’t an achievement. My dear, I totally agree. So bear in mind that for the past seven years I’ve been doing far more than wibbling about my breakfast here - check out the projects list, for starters.
That’s shameless.
It’s a pity that they don’t have a Lifetime Boredom category, because I reckon that I’d be up for that.
or Lifetime Neglect. i’d be in with a shot at that.
I’m even more shameless. I’m just going around prostituting myself in people’s comments boxes this year. I think I have lost all my morals. And my scruples. And my mind.
Well I have been reading you for I am sure the entire 7 years and I DO think you have one of the best blogs out there. I don’t know if it counts but you are on my list of top 5.
Congratulations! When most other blogs are barely our of nappies, yours is riding bikes and swearing and tying its own shoes and everything.
Well done Meg.
hello meg,
using the wayback machine you may be able to get some of those ancient handwritten posts. with a little digging i found:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000818062052/www.notsosoft.com/blog/febblog.html
and
http://web.archive.org/web/20000818062058/www.notsosoft.com/blog/marblog.html
hope it helps a bit. glad to see you’re atill writing.
@bakiwop: Aha! Fantastic. Thanks for digging those out! I wonder where janblog.html went?
@Birdy: thank you! *blush*
Blimey, lifetime achievement award it is then!
I’m STILL hoping for ‘best undiscovered blog’ someday… August 1999 is the oldest I can find for my site… but that was before we knew what blogs were. Remember that day?
And now a better comment to replace the earlier comment that was simply a result of my brief fling with being a Complete and Utter Web Tart.
It’s interesting to see those very early pages. I can’t claim to have been reading not.so.soft from that far back (though I do like the very fashionable minimalism of the pink and stark white design, which is years ahead of its time). I think I must have started reading in August or September 2000, after which you can count as one of your perhaps rather more dubious achievements the fact that you were at least fifty per cent responsible for me having decide to try this blogging lark for myself. (The other blog responsible has, needless to say, long since disappeared into the ether.) So it’s your fault that I’m here, basically. I hope this does not keep you awake at night.
As for blogging not being an achievement - hmm, well, no, I suppose it isn’t. Except. I think seven years of blogging *is*. In these days of the ultra-short attention span, keeping anything going beyond a few months is a bloody miracle, so seven years of consistent blogging is beyond a miracle. Worthy of a lifetime achievement award, I’d say.
I think Matt The Bakiwop has been lurking around in our comment boxes for most of the last seven years too.
As for the person who complained about breakfast wibblings, when it were all fields around here it was cool to talk about breakfast. Today I had Dorset Cereals muesli whilst spoon-feeding Tom a mixture of pureed mango and Oatbix. What did you have? (and we didn’t have memes then either, we just kinda copied each other).