As I re-post blog entries that were written almost 10 years ago, I am struck by how I still agree with myself. LOL. I researched the heck out of my early web writings on Late Boomers. Blogs now tend to be opinion pieces, and my early writings certainly contained opinions, but before the word blog came into common use and patterns of practice became standardized, I simply thought that I should back up my assertions with references to supporting documents and publications. I thought about the original Late Boomers net presence a lot. There were many and varied components that I tried out. There were e-lists and groups that migrated from one host or provider to others, there were newsletters that were sent out to the egroups and were also collected together on websites that came and went with success and failure of many dot com start-ups much to my consternation, and there was a website on the Webseed network. In my mind Late Boomers was an electronic ‘zine.
I began research and writing in this area in the late 1990s when at the same time I starting working at home so I could keep a close eye on my pre-teen, My income dropped dramatically so I tried to get as much for free as possible. I wasn’t terribly fond of coding anything. In retrospect another course of action might have been prudent such as shifting to a blog platform early on but even by 2004 it wasn’t clear where blogging would lead. I created a website after Webseed closed, but incompetent hosts lost my domain for me. At some point I just got tired of trying to navigate the wonderful world of Dreamweaver while trying to stop a war. Wikipedia documents the evolution of blogs thusly:
Early blogs were simply manually updated components of common Web sites. However, the evolution of tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of Web articles posted in reverse chronological order made the publishing process feasible to a much larger, less technical, population. Ultimately, this resulted in the distinct class of online publishing that produces blogs we recognize today. For instance, the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of “blogging”. Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, or they can be run using blog software, or on regular web hosting services. — from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog on 5/15/2011.
So I have conceded that Late Boomers was originally a blog with a separate forum. The forum can still be found on Yahoo Groups. I’m migrating the blog posts that hang together for me, even after 10 years, over to this blog because I am my own toughest critic and if I find them valuable, perhaps you will too. I no longer have much of an opinion on whether these pieces were first published on a blog, zine, or online publication. They are blog posts now.
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