The online peleton
I think of myself as a bicyclist. I almost always ride alone. I ride hard and feel good about it afterwards.
On Saturday, I did 50 miles on my road bike—a good distance but not terribly special, or difficult. Except for one thing. This time I was riding with a friend and he pounded me into the ground. I suffered on the flats and even more on the hills, pushing as hard as I could and still watching him steadily pull away. We’d stop at a crossroads and he’d ask which way we should go. Inside I kept saying, “Oh damn, oh damn, the short way, whatever’s the short way. Get me home, make it end. Please.”
But out loud I’d answer, “It’s your ride. You pick.” So I suffered, and when it was over, finally, I was spent and I was sore.
But I knew I’d had an excellent ride, maybe one of my best rides ever. Not just because I was challenged and had a great workout, but because I learned so much. The main lesson was that I can’t do it alone. I’ve been riding regularly but always by myself—with no-one there to push me, kick my ass, rub my nose in the dirt.
So now I have to rev up my solo rides 3 or 4 notches, and I have to find some group rides and some training partners. They’ll make me hurt and that’s what I need if I’m going to get better.
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It’s the same thing with all my wonderful thoughts and ideas about what we’re experiencing online and in other media. I read, watch, observe, and my reactions are so terribly clever. Or at least that’s what I think. But if I don’t put my thoughts out there—and give others the chance to ignore them, or shoot them down, or maybe even appreciate them and make them better—then I’m just riding alone and probably not riding all that well. If I don’t join the group ride, I’m not going to grow.
A second post — about first posts
So I began to wonder how did the other bloggers start? How many have left their first posts online for curious folks like me to search out? Maybe I could find some reassurance that even the best began with just a bit of stage fright.
I started by checking some favourites. How far back do they go, and can I be sure the earliest post I find is the actual first post? For example, I really enjoy David Armano’s Logic + Emotion. Well, I enjoy a lot of blogs but his tends to be one that I find myself emailing again and again to the folks I work with. The earliest post I could find was “Amazon Music Store: The Future Amazon Shopping Experience?” (February 2, 2006). No indication at all that it’s the first post, except that it’s the earliest I could find. He seems to have decided to take the less self-conscious route. (Or maybe he erased the evidence.)
Guy Kawasaki has been a big name in technology and entrepreneurship for a long time, so it was surprising to find that he didn’t start blogging until Dec. 30, 2005. The first post on his How to Change the World was the wonderfully titled “Better Late than Arrogant”, which began: “Welcome to my first attempt at blogging. Admittedly, I’m three years behind the bleeding edge, but I had to get over the inherent arrogance of blogging: that people would give a shitake about what I have to say.”
And just to be on the safe side he was careful to point out, parenthetically, “Not that I’m committing to daily blog.”
In my limited search for first posts, one that really stood out is by Douglas Bowman of stopdesign fame. He wrote in “Something New”, “It’s with great humility that I hammer out this first post. Humility, because I enter the game way after many others.” How should this make me feel, knowing that he wrote it on August 12, 2002?
He went on to say: “The fact that you’re reading this probably means one of three things: 1.) You somehow discovered this log in its infancy, either by accident or by some referrer log that claims I linked to your site. 2.) I’ve somehow managed to continue blabbing about something interesting enough that you actually went back in time through thousands of posts to see what I wrote for the very first entry. 3.) You’re my Mom, and seem to remember me telling you something about a ‘block?’”
Going waaaay back (to 1997!), there’s The Best Page in the Universe for which the earliest page is now only available as a screenshot, but it started: “Welcome to The Best Page in the Universe. This page is about me and why everything I like is great. If you disagree with anything you find on this page, you are wrong.”
So much for stage fright.
This experiment could go on forever. If you’re interested in more samples of first posts, check out the appropriately named First Post!
There are millions of blogs already. They all started somewhere, somehow, and now…
Here I am, and this is my second post.
First Post
I’ve been wondering how to start. This is it. Moving on…