A year and a half ago I posted an entry that discussed online relationships and the beginnings of blogging, in which I briefly discussed the relationship of two semi-prominent bloggers and also took a few moments for self-pity. The two, Jason and Meg, were written up in a _New Yorker_ piece that introduced the world to blogging by telling a classic love story with an electronic twist. Doesn’t it make you nostalgic, thinking back to a time when people didn’t know what a blog was? When, in fact, a blog was something different than it is today?

Anyway, the follow-up is that Meg and Jason are now engaged, an interesting tidbit I stumbled across when I happened to click on Meg’s “about” link today. Backtracking a bit I found an entry announcing the good news and reflecting on that original 2000 _New Yorker_ article:

bq. A lot has changed in the five years since Rebecca wrote “You’ve Got Blog.” Pretty much everyone knows what a blog is now, and most people are probably sick of hearing about them. Pyra was bought by Google, who now own Blogger. Neither Ev nor I nor any of the people who were involved in Blogger when Rebecca came to visit our offices in San Francisco are involved in the product anymore. Most of us don’t even blog very consistently these days. And I don’t think any of us qualify as “A-list” bloggers anymore — there certainly are no more shrines to Pyra!

Blogging has, like everything always does, sold out, gone mainstream, gone corporate, been invaded by spammers, been monetized, been vanilla-ized so that everyone has a LiveJournal or a MySpace or any of a thousand other blog-pretender services, there are millions of blogs, most of them are crap, and there is just no way (and really no reason) to keep up. Meanwhile so many of the original techie webheads who started the blogging “revolution” have moved on to other things and don’t post frequently or with any consistancy anymore, if at all.

I know I’m going a little overboard with the nostalgia lately, but I was reading some of Luis’s and Nat’s older entries about working in a high tech company even after the supposed bubble had supposedly burst, and I just keep feeling like I missed out on the revolution. The world is fundamentally different, and when it was all happening I was just growing up and in school, and missed out on a chance to really experience it all first-hand, get my feet wet, make my millions, and be part of the revolution. Will we ever again in our lifetimes have that sort of atmosphere of unbridled enthusiasm and belief in the power of technology to change the world? Will we ever again have such a concentration of raw energy, such a massive engine of change? Man, I hope so. I really hope so.

At Berkman its easy to feel the change, to feel it in your bones. At one point that place was a shining beacon of light in a legal world that couldn’t get a grip on the internet. They were leading experiments and bringing people together and figuring out how to regulate the net and how to apply the law to new and shifting tech. Now that, too, is mainstream, the law has adapted, things have settled, and Berkman is about putting out studies and working on research projects, like a “real” research institute. Not that there is anything wrong with that, or that Berkman has gone down hill, its just that the whole climate, the whole atmosphere has changed. A global warming of the net, so to speak — that is, if you believe in that sort of thing. 😉 The Berkman of today just doesn’t feel as sexy and cutting edge as it did when I was reading about it in high school and was participating in OpenLaw and the like.

So here I sit, awaiting the next big thing. Probably not a great way to be spending my time, but really there is not much for me to do. I get a job doing something I enjoy, I stick with it, I get another one, etc. I’m not going to easily or quickly find a job that lets me feel like I’m changing the world, not anymore. I’m going to have to find a different kind of satisfaction. Perhaps one that is more earned.