More Old Tech

Speaking of old tech, does anyone remember Epinions?

It's still around, actually, so even if you've forgotten it or never heard of it, you could check it out today and get in on the action. These days, naturally, it has an RSS feed, which it did not back in the day when I was participating. 

It's a website where members post reviews of things--products, movies, books, locations, companies--and make money based on how helpful other members (and, I think, random visitors) rate the advice.

I joined back in 2000, and when I think about it, it was really a sort of proto-blogging scene. 

You're only writing reviews of specific things, so it's a limited-focus blogging, but you'd get a group of people whose writing you enjoyed and whose posts you'd always be sure to read (with a 'trusted' list that showed up on your profile much like a blogroll), and people would insert bits of detail about their lives so you sort of got to feel you knew them, and you could leave comments on each others' posts, and so forth.

So come to think of it, I was essentially blogging years ago!

I gave up Epinions after a couple of years, when they were having some technical issues and one day my most recent hard-written posts disappeared, leaving only the sad empty shells of the titles on the screen. I always spent a lot of time crafting my reviews, trying to get just the right turn of phrase and so forth, so losing all that work was significant.

I didn't have the heart to rewrite those two posts, but the lonely little titles, which I couldn't bear to just delete, haunted me so that I couldn't work on anything else either, and I never wrote there again. 

As you can perhaps tell, it was a very traumatic experience.

I blame the lingering scars of this event for my failure to take up blogging, even when all the cool people were doing it, until I was obliged to by course requirements. 

Every now and then I think about returning to Epinions. I do like to tell people what I think about things, after all, and I always like to make a little money. (A lot of money would also be nice, but seems to rarely be associated with telling people what you think on the internet.)

But I have a lot of other things to do these days, so in all likelihood this will not happen.