I went to college with Jess Barron. We were even on the newspaper staff together at one point. She now lives in the Bay Area, too, but we’ve only seen each other once out here. In true fashion of its being a small world, I even work with her fiance.
I mention Jess now because I was just reading about the legal problems she recently faced with her domain name (poprocks.com) and how fucked up that is. It makes me mad when evil corporations pick on individuals. The whole domain name rights issue is a tricky one, but Jess has a solid case for keeping her domain name, and I hope she gets to.
So why am I writing about this under the header of “Project Email?” Something I’ve been thinking about lately — my next big Web project — is to go back through a selection of old emails that captures the essence of what was going on in my life at the time and post it to my blog. A reverse-blog, if you will (I wonder if anyone else has used that term before — hmm, only about 7 people have).
Anyhow, I often kick myself for not having published lots of Web content over the past 9 or so years that I’ve been online (since the early days of the 2400-baud modem and BBS “sites”). I’ve had my own domain name since 1998, when I was still in college, and put my first personal Web site online before that — during my freshman year of college in 1995. (I hope some day to find those old Web files on my Mac, once I get around to fixing it, and publish them online once again.) I think that Web publishing rocks. It’s a great way of not only creating a personal history while living it (as I’ve said before), but capturing the moment; creating content for others to benefit from; adding to the vast collection of human knowledge that is the World Wide Web.
So my recent idea was this: Even though I haven’t been blogging for years, I’ve been emailing for years. And I’m anal about keeping my sent archives. I have immediate access to sent archives dating back to June 1999 (all the emails that are archived on my Web server and sent via Pine). Additionally, I have buried on my Mac emails dating back to 1995, when I started college. Assuming my data aren’t corrupt, which I’m hoping is not the case, I can eventually dig up all those emails. I can then take these email archives, reverse-blog them, and voila! I will have created a virtual blog that encapsulates my life and my online presence back to 1999 — and eventually all the way back to 1995. That will rule.
Which brings me back to Jess. I read parts of her site from time to time and am inspired by her and what she’s done online. I like how she’s created an online “playground,” as she calls it, and I’d like to do the same. I have tons of electronic content, so it’s just a matter of roping it all in to make it easily accessible to me, my friends, family, future-children, and, of course, the world.
And that, my friends, is what Project Email is all about. Stay tuned…
