2001. Ahhh… the wayback machine.

Just for kicks, let’s take a look at some of the hilarity that masqueraded as my nascent web presence:

1. Comic Sans — already sick of the limited web-friendly fonts available, I played a silly trick on the world and used the font that never dare say its own name backwards, or, as one friend righteously recently put it: “Comic Sans is the Mark of The Beast. Shit, I even used it back in 2000 when I went with the Message board-blog hybrid approach (or something).
2. I wanted to have a list of choice links — but I didn’t want to show my hand in the open. Not amid all the other highly SEO’d meta tagged engaging content on my “home page” (joke). After 9/11 I was a bit more willing to lay it all out there, thought not with quite the hyperlinked artistry of some. Basically, to copy and paste, this is how my linkblock –er, brailleroll — looked in July 2001:

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3. I was already well-rooted as a snobby lo-fi music buff with an emphasis on Chicago indie. BUT clearly inspired from my stint as Smithsonian Folkways webmaster, I decided to profile my then-favorite albums alongside REAL AUDIO clips. Hahahaha. Mind you, before the mp3 renaissance of the late 90’s, Real Audio streams and broadcast.com were the-coolest-things-ever-invented. Surely these songs sounded better in Comic Sans.
   
4. By ’02 I had mellowed a bit. Live365 offered streaming at higher bandwidths and I focused a bit more on WOOZradio (which in its 10+ year existence has yet to break even for a month. I pay to play your music). What I could never do now that I loved doing then was music listings of concerts that I would go to in Chicago (where I lived) if I could clone myself.

contact: e-mail | icq | AolIM: netZoo

Laugh at me now — I hope you had half as much fun as I had looking back into the past. The CRAZY thing is that our Comic Sans’d, hacked-together framed message board history is only a decade old. Come to think of it I should have stuck with the blank slate blogging style (with illustrations) I switched to around New Years Eve 2000. I guess I’ve been blogging for a while (with a few years off in between). We’ll look at those middle-aughts later (the WordPress years). What a decade its been!

What silly blog skeletons are gathering dust in your archive?

EXTRAS:

One of these days I’ll clean this place up… or… I’ll at least publish more often. One of these days.

I’ve been actively blogging here for 2.5 years — and intermittently since 1999, when I first launched WOOZradio. Why don’t I bother to self-promote or even make cards/stickers to increase traffic and the minimal revenue flow that could help me break even on the $15 a month or so I spend to keep Live365 running and paying royalties. Because I feel stupid talking about myself to a computer screen, I prefer to let my mind run free under the assumption assume that nobody is really reading, and, well, in the end I just do it for me.

Here’s an image that was on the front of netzoo.net back around mid-2001. Go ahead — click and see what this place looked like back then — it takes a few clicks to get to the music clips. Instead of actually listing my blogroll preferred online mags and music sites, I used orange colons. I have no idea why. The entire history of my lackadaisical updating of my personal web site / blog / whatever is well-documented (along with everything else on the innernetz) at archive.org.

That’s my little reflection for the day and now on with it. The sky looks awesome out my window (I’m here looking to the northwest) and there is much to be done at the day job (Yes, I do have a real, full-time job). My extra special Derby Dolls photo essay (thanks, Kelly) from the Tough Cookes-Fight Crew bout is scheduled to pop up now live at LAist during lunch. P.S.: If you want me to take you out in the next couple weeks, I’d love to, visit Caroline on Crack for more on that.

From Library of Congress’ Flickr. Jack Delano. General view of one of the classification yards of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, Chicago, Ill. 1942 Dec.

This is GREAT news, the Library of Congress today announced a pilot project with Flickr to populate an account with millions of images marked “No known copyright restrictions.” From the Library’s blog:

The project is beginning somewhat modestly, but we hope to learn a lot from it. Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3,000 photos from two of our most popular collections are being made available on our new Flickr page, to include only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist.

Visit the Flickr Commons project.