If you look back in my archives, you'll see that in October 2000, I wrote this:
I've just started using a new weblog service called Blogger, recommended on the Web page of my friend Alistair Calder, for news and updates. So, this first entry includes all the news up until today, which I had previously entered manually (and not very often).
So, as of this month, October 2010, it's now 10 years since I formally started blogging. (You could argue that my earlier, infrequent, reverse-chronological list of updates was also a manually-created blog starting in 1997, but I won't.)
That first post includes a lot of broken links, inevitably after this long. But it also features a brief announcement of the birth of my second daughter, a few internal links you won't easily find elsewhere on the site anymore, and an awareness—even so early in my blogging career—that I'd like to preserve what came before.
Happy 10th blogiversary, penmachine.com.
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Congratulations, Derek! How many people asked when you first started "how can you monetize it?"
Back then I don't think people were thinking in those terms for blogs yet. It was still the dot-com boom, and since I wasn't selling pet food or delivering groceries online, or planning a huge IPO, a blog didn't look like a hip business.
And it wasn't, and was never supposed to be. The Google AdSense ads cover hosting costs and such, and that's all I need.
Now, when I got into podcasting five years later, that's when people started wondering how I was going to make some dough, even though I never tried to do it there either.
I wonder what makes Podcasting so special. I don't think anyone's ever asked me that of videos I've posted to YouTube or blog posts I've written. But Podcasts, all the time!
It could just be a historical accident, in that early podcasters like Adam Curry hyped podcasting as a new money-making medium, so other people followed suit and thought of it that way too.
Ten years, wow. Happy birthday, Derek's blog :-)