On this day in 2004, I wrote my first post here on Webtorque.org

As with all things Internet, 10 years seems more like 50. Tim O’Reilly had just started popularising the term  “Web 2.0“, and the digerati were people who did things like blogs – before Twitter came along and made everyone do it, sort of.  For me, this was all glued together, in the UK at least, by NTK, in which I once got a name check for an unbelievably obscure joke involving The Santa Cruz Operation and a now-forgotten pop band.

Although I had more grand hopes for Webtorque when I first started (I was toying with setting up a design agency at the time, but chickened out), it’s really been just a public diary. To that effect, I’m slightly relieved that it hasn’t had the kind of traffic I first hoped it would get, because I’m not sure if I’d fully agree with (or even understand!) some of what I’ve written here in the past.

There have been some interesting moments though. I got into a conversation with Seth Godin after I described his speaking ability as “average” (hope it’s OK to mention that now – it was a number of years ago). Britt Allcroft similarly felt the need to defend herself against some slightly unfair criticism of her. I have also agreed to remove a post that criticised somebody, not because my criticism was unjustified, but because I had better SEO on searches for their name than they did. So at least one thing I’ve learnt is that it’s easy to make enemies.

Otherwise, Webtorque has been a nice, warm, self-indulgent and barely-noticed vehicle for expressing my thoughts in ways I don’t think I would have done otherwise. And for that I think it’s been worth it.  I hope I’ll still be writing entries in 2024.