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Oct 22 / thomas.krafft

And so we begin…

In December, 1995 (I can’t believe it’s been almost 14 years already), I was preparing to earn my political science BA from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. The “World Wide Web” was still new, we were all using gopher, Lynx (text browsers), Mosaic and Netscape v.1. and I was daydreaming about all the potential for human discourse that might one day be realized through the internet.

Instead of going into law or politics, I followed the internet. Turns out I had a knack for technical stuff, design, building websites and helping companies “connect with their customers online” (a phrase I’ve trademarked, by the way). And so, I’ve been working, living, paying the bills and doing chores, taking the kids to soccer and after school programs… and then one day, you wake up and decide it’s time to do something about that little idea you had 14 years ago.

In 1995, my political interests and studies combined with the vast potential I could see for global communications via the internet. This was before sophisticated forums of blog software even existed, or any of the kinds of email, chat, instant and text messaging, or any of the online technology that supports some of the very kinds of dynamic human interaction that I envisioned back then. I’m pretty pleased with myself for being correct in my predictions all those years ago… but still kicking myself for not buying more stock in Microsoft and Apple. 🙂

Thanks to Google, what would have taken several weeks of effort in my off-hours just a few years ago, today only took a few minutes – in which time I managed to (1.) create a blog to which any number of contributors may add their thoughts, and the public may comment and follow the exchanges easily, (2.) setup the look-and-feel the way I want, (3.) add some analytics and adsense, and enable pretty much any of the functionality I could have possibly dreamed of, back when webpages were basically blocks of text with a numerous “hyperlinks” to sites that don’t even exist anymore.

I’m rambling, but hey, it’s my blog.

Next post: How it all started