On Friday morning, plasticbag.org reached the age of three years old. It seems like a fairly major milestone to me – maybe three years is the time when you begin to think to yourself, “Is this actually something I’m going to be doing for the foreseeable future – maybe for the rest of my life?” A scary thought…
If you’re interested enough – and god knows why you would be – you can still read the first weblog post I ever made over a thousand days ago… A thousand days… It would be good to be able to say that I’d posted almost every day of that time, but since I’ve just bunked off for almost a week, I think that might seem a bit cheeky…
So what’s happened over the last three years? What have I accomplished? I’ve met loads of new friends. I’ve gone from starting work at Time Out to being Production Editor of their website, through to unemployment, helping out on TCN, working on an education site for Europeans and Ethiopians and building a community for the BBC. Now I’m at UpMyStreet.com. I’ve had a couple of different relationships – mostly disasterous. I’ve sapped around quite a bit – as if there was a storm-cloud perpetually around me, and bounced around like a puppy for much briefer, but much more memorable, amounts of time.
I’ve written an awful lot of crap on my site, but I’ve also written odds and ends that I’ll always be able to keep and look at and be proud of. I’ve also pissed any number of people off. Which probably suggests I’m doing something right…
So where to go from here? God knows. I’d be lying if I said I never got bored of thinking of something to offer up to the world each day. I do. Show me another three-year vintage weblogger that doesn’t feel that occasionally. I don’t think the future will contain as much about my personal life, because I think after a while the more you write about something, the thinner it gets… It’s like you wear it out. After a while you want something that’s just for you – that’s yours alone and that you share with no one. I’ve already been writing less and less about what I do away from the computer… So I think the future probably lies more in the ideas that I have, or the opinions that I need to express. Maybe that’s the direction that weblogging itself will be taking as the huge Blogger Boom generation of the last two years settles down and tries to find a sense of purpose for their sites – a reason to keep writing every day. I can only hope that’ll be interesting enough to keep you guys sticking around…
In the meantime, thanks for coming and I’ll see you all in three years time… xx Tom