His first home page had a tone of mischievous intimacy. It included a photo of Hall mugging behind Colonel Oliver North, another of Cary Grant taking acid, and a sincere shout-out to “Al Gore, the information tollroad’s first official pedestrian.” The tone was conversational. “Howdy,” the home page declared. “This is twenty-first century computing. Is it worth our patience? I’m publishing this, and I guess you’re readin’ this, in part to figure that out, huh?”
At the time, there were no Web directories or search engines, other than very staid ones like the W3 Catalog from the University of Geneva and a “What’s New” page from NCSA at the University of Illinois. So Hall invented one for his site, which he elegantly titled “Here’s a Menu of Cool Shit.” Shortly thereafter, in an homage to Dostoevsky, he renamed it “Justin’s Links from the Underground.” It included links to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the World Bank, and websites created by beer connoisseurs, fans of the rave music scene, and a guy at the University of Pennsylvania named Ranjit Bhatnagar who had created a similar Web page. “Believe me, the author is a very cool guy,” Hall noted. He also included a list of bootleg concert recordings, featuring Jane’s Addiction and Porno for Pyros. “Leave me a note if you are interested in these, or if you have any of your own,” he wrote. Not surprisingly, given the fixations of Justin and his users, there were also many sections devoted to erotica, including pages called “Survey of Sexuality on the Sprawl” and “Pointers to Pages o’ Purveyed Prurience.” He helpfully reminded his users, “Don’t forget to wipe the semen off your keyboards!”
Justin’s Links from the Underground became the spiky pathfinder for a proliferation of directories, such as Yahoo and then Lycos and Excite, that began to blossom later that year. But in addition to providing a portal to the wonderland of the Web, Hall created something weirdly beguiling that turned out to be even more significant: a running Web log of his personal activities, random thoughts, deep musings, and intimate encounters. It became the first wholly new form of content to be created for, and take advantage of, personal computer networks. His Web log included poignant poems about his father’s suicide, musings about his diverse sexual desires, pictures of his penis, endearingly edgy stories about his stepfather, and other effusions that darted back and forth across the line of Too Much Information. In short, he became the founding scamp of blogging.
“I was on the literary magazine in high school,” he said, “and I had published some very personal things.” That became the recipe for his and many future blogs: stay casual, get personal, be provocative. He posted a picture of himself standing nude onstage that he had been prevented from using in his high school yearbook, along with the tale of the girl editors “giggling while checking out the black-and-white photo of my tweeter.” He later told the story of an evening of painful intercourse with a girl, after which his foreskin had swelled; it was illustrated with many close-ups of his genital situation. In so doing, he helped innovate a sensibility for a new age. “I always tried to provoke, and nudity was part of the provocation,” he explained, “so I have a long tradition of doing things that would make my mom blush.”57
Hall’s willingness to push the boundaries of Too Much Information became a hallmark of blogging. It was cheekiness raised to a moral attitude. “TMI is like the deep lab data from all of our human experiments,” he later explained. “If you reveal TMI, it can make people feel a little less alone.” That was no trivial feat. Indeed, making people feel a little less alone was part of the essence of the Internet.
The case of his swollen foreskin was an example; within a few hours people from around the world posted comments offering their own stories, cures, and assurance that the condition was temporary. A more poignant case came from his postings about his father, an alcoholic who had committed suicide when Justin was eight. “My father was a wry, humanistic, sensitive man,” he wrote. “Also an intolerant spiteful bastard.” Hall recounted how his father would sing Joan Baez folk songs to him, but also down bottles of vodka and wave guns and berate waitresses. After Hall learned that he was the last person to talk to his father before he killed himself, he posted a poem: “What did we say / I wonder / and / what did it matter? / Could I have changed your mind?” These entries gave rise to a virtual support group. Readers sent in their own stories, and Hall posted them. Sharing led to connections. Emily Ann Merkler wrestled with losing her father to epilepsy. Russell Edward Nelson included scans of his late father’s driver’s license and other documents. Werner Brandt put up a remembrance page of his father that featured piano songs he had liked. Justin posted them along with his own musings. It became a social network. “The Internet encourages participation,” he noted. “By exposing myself on the Web, I hope folks will be inspired to put a little soul in their systems.”
A few months after he started his Web log, Hall managed to wrangle, through a tenacious volley of phone calls and emails, an internship for the summer of 1994 at HotWired.com in San Francisco. Wired magazine, under its charismatic editor Louis Rossetto, was in the process of creating one of the first magazine websites. Its executive editor was Howard Rheingold, an insightful online sage who had just published The Virtual Community, which described the social mores and satisfactions that came from “homesteading on the electronic frontier.” Hall became Rheingold’s friend and protégé, and together they engaged in a struggle with Rossetto over the soul of the new site.58
Rheingold felt that HotWired.com, in contrast to the printed magazine, should be a loosely controlled community, a “global jam session” filled with user-generated material. “I was part of Howard’s faction that really felt that community was important and wanted to build user forums and tools that made it easy for people to comment to each other,” Hall recalled. One idea they pushed was devising ways that members of the community could develop their own online identities and reputations. “The value is users talking to users,” Hall argued to Rossetto. “People are the content.”
Rossetto instead felt that HotWired should be a well-crafted and highly designed publishing platform, featuring rich imagery, that would extend the brand of the magazine and create a striking Wired-like identity online. “We have these great artists and we should feature them,” he argued. “We are going to make something beautiful and professional and polished, which is what the Web lacks.” Building a lot of tools for user-generated content and comments would be “too much of a sideshow.”59
The debate was waged in long meetings and impassioned email chains. But Rossetto prevailed, and his outlook, which was shared by many other print-world editors, ended up shaping the evolution of the Web. It became primarily a platform for publishing content rather than for creating virtual communities. “The era of public-access Internet has come to an end,” Rossetto declared.60
When Hall returned from his extended summer gig at HotWired, he decided to become an evangelist for the other side of the argument, believing that the public-access aspects of the Internet should be celebrated and supported. With less sociological sophistication than Rheingold but more youthful exuberance, he began to preach the redemptive nature of virtual communities and Web logs. “I’ve been putting my life online, telling stories about the people I know and the things that happen to me when I’m not geeking out,” he explained online after a year. “Talking about myself keeps me going.”
His manifestos described the appeal of a new public-access medium. “When we tell stories on the Internet, we claim computers for communication and community over crass commercialism,” he declared in one of his early postings. As someone who had spent hours on the Internet’s early bulletin boards when he was growing up, he wanted to recapture the spirit of the Usenet newsgroups and The WELL.
And so Hall became the Johnny Appleseed of Web logging. On his site, he posted an offer to teach people HTML publishing if they would host him for a night or two, and in the summer of 1996 he traveled by bus across the United States, dropping in on those who took him up on the offer. “He t
ook a medium that had been conceived as a repository for scholarship and scaled it down to personal size,” Scott Rosenberg wrote in his history of blogging, Say Everything.61 Yes, but he also helped to do something more: return the Internet and the Web to what they were intended to be, tools for sharing rather than platforms for commercial publishing. Web logging made the Internet more humanizing, which was no small transformation. “The best use of our technology enhances our humanity,” Hall insisted. “It lets us shape our narrative and share our story and connect us.”62
The phenomenon quickly spread. In 1997 John Barger, who produced a fun website called Robot Wisdom, coined the term weblog, and two years later a web designer named Peter Merholz jokingly broke the word back into two by saying he was going to use the phrase we blog. The word blog entered the common parlance.IV By 2014 there would be 847 million blogs in the world.
It was a social phenomenon that was not fully appreciated by the traditional wordcrafting elite. It was easy, and not altogether incorrect, to denigrate much of the self-centered blatherings that appeared on blogs and to smirk at those who spent their evenings posting on little-read pages. But as Arianna Huffington pointed out early on when she created her blogging outlet, the Huffington Post, people decided to partake in these acts of social discourse because they found them fulfilling.63 They got the chance to express their ideas, tailor them for public consumption, and get feedback. This was a new opportunity for people who had previously spent evenings passively consuming what was fed to them through their television screens. “Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college,” Clive Thompson noted in his book, Smarter Than You Think. “This is something that’s particularly hard to grasp for professionals whose jobs require incessant writing, like academics, journalists, lawyers or marketers.”64
In his own sweet way, Justin Hall understood the glory of this. It was what would make the digital age different from the era of television. “By publishing ourselves on the web, we reject the role of passive media marketing recipient,” he wrote. “If we all have a place to post our pages—the Howard Rheingold channel, the Rising City High School channel—there’s no way the web will end up as banal and mediocre as television. There will be as many places to find fresh and engaging content as there are people who yearn to be heard. Good telling of human stories is the best way to keep the Internet and the World Wide Web from becoming a waste vastland.”65
EV WILLIAMS AND BLOGGER
By 1999 blogs were proliferating. They were no longer mainly the playpen of offbeat exhibitionists like Justin Hall who posted personal journals about their lives and fancies. They had become a platform for freelance pundits, citizen journalists, advocates, activists, and analysts. But there was one problem: to publish and maintain an independent blog required some coding skills and access to a server. Creating user simplicity is one of the keys to successful innovation. For blogging to become a whole new medium that would transform publishing and democratize public discourse, someone had to make it easy, as easy as “Type in this box and then press this button.” Enter Ev Williams.
Born in 1972 on a corn and soybean farm on the edge of the hamlet of Clarks, Nebraska (population: 374), Ev Williams grew up as a lanky, shy, and often lonely boy who never got into hunting and football, which made him a bit of an oddity. Instead he played with Legos, built wooden skateboards, took apart bikes, and spent a lot of time on of his family’s green tractor, after he had finished his irrigation chores, staring into the distance and daydreaming. “Books and magazines were my outlet to the larger world,” he recalled. “My family never really traveled, so I never went anywhere.”66
He didn’t have a computer growing up, but when he went to the University of Nebraska in 1991 he discovered the world of online services and bulletin boards. He began reading all he could about the Internet, even subscribing to a magazine about electronic bulletin boards. After dropping out of college, he decided to start a company to make CD-ROMs explaining the online world for local businessmen. Shot in his basement with a borrowed camera, the videos looked like a no-budget community access show, and they didn’t sell. So he wandered off to California and took a job as a junior writer at the tech publisher O’Reilly Media, where he revealed his prickly independence by sending an email to the entire staff refusing to write material for one of the company’s products because it “was a piece of shit.”
With the instincts of a serial entrepreneur, he was always itching to start his own companies, and at the beginning of 1999 he launched one called Pyra Labs with a savvy woman named Meg Hourihan, whom he’d briefly dated. Unlike others jumping into the dotcom frenzy of that period, they focused on using the Internet for its original purpose: online collaboration. Pyra Labs offered a suite of Web-based applications that allowed teams to share project plans, lists of things to do, and jointly created documents. Williams and Hourihan found that they needed a simple way to share their own random notions and interesting items, so they began posting on a little internal website, which they dubbed “Stuff.”
By this time Williams, who had always loved magazines and publications, had gotten into reading blogs. Rather than personal journals such as Hall’s, he became a fan of the technology commentators who were pioneering serious Web journalism, such as Dave Winer, who had created one of the first weblogs, Scripting News, and designed an XML syndication format for it.67
Williams had his own home page, called EvHead, on which he posted a section of updated notes and comments. Like others who added such logs to their home pages, he had to type each item and update using HTML code. Wanting to streamline the process, he wrote a simple software script that automatically converted his posts into the proper format. It was a little hack that had a transforming effect. “The idea that I could have a thought and I could type in a form and it would be on my website in a matter of seconds completely transformed the experience. It was one of those things that, by automating the process, completely morphed what it was I was doing.”68 He soon began to wonder whether this little side dish could become a product of its own.
One of the basic lessons for innovation is to stay focused. Williams knew that his first company had failed because it tried to do thirty things and succeeded at none. Hourihan, who had been a management consultant, was adamant: Williams’s blogger scripting tool was neat, but it was a distraction. It could never be a commercial product. Williams acquiesced, but in March he quietly registered the domain name blogger.com. He couldn’t resist. “I have always been a product guy, and am just always thinking about products and thought this would be a cool little idea.” In July, when Hourihan was on vacation, he launched Blogger as a separate product, without telling her. He was following another basic lesson for innovation: Don’t stay too focused.
When Hourihan returned and discovered what had happened, she started shouting and threatened to quit. Pyra had only one other employee besides themselves, and there was no capacity to take on distractions. “She was pissed,” Williams recalled. “But we talked her into thinking that it made sense.” It did. Blogger attracted enough fans in the ensuing months that Williams, with his laconic and awkward charm, became one of the stars of the March 2000 South by Southwest conference. By the end of the year, Blogger had 100,000 accounts.
What it did not have, however, was revenue. Williams had been offering Blogger for free in the vague hope that it would entice folks into buying the Pyra app. But by the summer of 2000 he had pretty much abandoned Pyra. With the Internet bubble bursting, it was not an easy time to raise money. The relationship between Williams and Hourihan, always a bit fraught, degenerated to the point that shouting matches at the office were a regular occurrence.
In January 2001 the cash crisis came to a head. Desperately in need of new servers, Williams made an appeal to Blogger’s users for donations. Close to $17,000 came in, which was enough to buy new hardware but not to pay salaries.69 Hou
rihan demanded that Williams step aside as CEO, and when he refused, she quit. “On Monday I resigned from the company I co-founded,” she wrote on her blog. “I’m still crying and crying and crying.”70 The other employees, by then six in total, walked out as well.
Williams posted a long entry titled “And Then There Was One” on his own blog. “We are out of money, and I have lost my team. . . . The last two years have been a long, hard, exciting, educational, once-in-a-lifetime, painful, and, ultimately, very rewarding and worthwhile journey for me.” Vowing to keep the service alive, even if he had to do it alone, he ended with a postscript: “If anyone wants to share some office space for a while, lemme know. I could use the cost savings (and the company).”71
Most people would have quit at that point. There was no money for rent, no one to keep the servers running, no sight of any revenue. He also faced painful personal and legal attacks from his former employees, causing him to rack up lawyer’s bills. “The story apparently was that I fired all my friends and I didn’t pay them and took over the company,” he said. “It was really ugly.”72
But ingrained in Williams’s hardscrabble heritage was the patience of a corn farmer and the stubbornness of an entrepreneur. He had an abnormally high level of immunity to frustration. So he persevered, testing that hazy borderline between persistence and cluelessness, remaining placid as problems bombarded him. He would run the company by himself, from his apartment. He would tend to the servers and the coding himself. “I basically went underground and did nothing but try to keep Blogger going.”73 Revenues were close to zero, but he could bring his costs in line with that. As he wrote in his Web posting, “I’m actually in surprisingly good shape. I’m optimistic. (I’m always optimistic.) And I have many, many ideas. (I always have many ideas.)”74