Can you remember coming across the odd blog way back before you even knew what ‘blogs’ were? C’mon be honest now, there was a time you din’t even know the word ‘blog’ :-), it’s okay – will be our little secret.

I can – and I admit I remember usually experiencing a bit of disdain for whoever it was plastering their life out across the virtual passages of cyberspace while also being just a little bit excited and intrigued by the sense of voyeurism – was I suppose to be able to see all this stuff I wondered.

Now of course UGC is the big thing, after 2.0 this and the other – but ironically – as I zoom past legions of blogs containing tips for that and the other, diligently published exposés, lists, tag-games, reviews and such by all these sudden self-proclaimed experts and specialist coming out of the woodwork – I suddenly miss those old techie personal ‘skinner’ sites. The ones that were only half-hiden behind online tester-reports or on ‘borrowed’ corporate hosting space.

The democratization of the nuosphere is really kewl, and I’ll keep supporting it where and as I can, but just for a moment I want to remember the net and how it was to me when I started discovering it through a hacked lecturer’s account at university (Doslan.UP.AC.ZA)

How my first mail list subscription, Wings on the Internet (W.O.T.I.) blew my mind, how as a lost soul fresh in Joburg an IRC friend in Texas (‘Kath’) organized me a ride home late one night with ‘Gomez’ & ‘Mortitia’)… stuff like that…

And that’s my soppiness quota for the week used up, back to other things.