Two blogs I read are MegNut and Kottke, written by two people who reference each other and who one can logically infer over a period of time are together. Recently Jason Kottke posted an entry about how his blog is six years old, and how he has never stuck with anything for that long. This caused me to wonder about how he met Meg, and whether there were references to their relationship’s beginnings in his blog. Them both very web-focused people, this seemed probable, and interesting. How did people talk about relationships on blogs back when blogs were first beginning?

I didn’t find much, just a few references here and there, but then I stumbled upon a Kottke article mentioning a New Yorker piece that had just came out that talked about his personal life, and how it was odd because he’s a fairly private person. I, being a blogger, do not see the contradiction that others might with having a blog and still being private. I consider myself pretty private, but at the same time I’ve become hopelessly addicted to blogging for a while now. I never post those “I have nothing to write about” posts any more — I always have something to write about.

Anyway, I finally found the article from 2000 and found it fascinating and exciting. It’s so nice to read about people similar to you who find happiness through new technology. It’s hopeful, it’s sweet, and it’s funny because it’s exactly what I was wondering about, and apparently so were other people, only they were interested four years ago.

I sometimes get into moods where I feel sad and that I am missing out on important things, such as these web communities. I didn’t have a blog back in 1999 when they were really starting up, I wasn’t involved in the dot-com process, I’m not in the cutting-edge high tech world. I’m not a mover, much less a shaker, and I don’t have a lot of the knowledge and history of those who are. This is a very limited world, that of web innovators, and yet even within it, a world that I sorta wish to inhabit, I don’t know one one-thousandth of what I should know. Apparently Kottke was quite the blogging celebrity back then. Now, of course, it’s harder, because, as with so many virtual communities, the world of blogging has lost its exclusivity and expanded dramatically, to the point where it can never really be any sort of tight community, it is just too vast, too varied, with too many people who have no concept of what blogs should be, or at least were. Maybe what they should be is what we make them. But with so much noise, how do we handle it all?

I recently turned in a long paper (to be posted here shortly) about online trust and relationships, and how to map relationships in the offline world to the online one. I just find the whole concept overwhelming sometimes, that there is so much information, and, more importantly, so many people out there that I am so drawn to, so interested in, but will never discover or meet or converse with. The whole vastness of the world around us is apparent to me most clearly, not when I survey busy city streets or visit foreign cities, but when I see links to sites I have never heard of, that I will never read, but that I wish I could, if only I had the time.