Every now and again I return to Rebecca’s Pocket, which was one of the first blogs I ever read, when I didn’t know what a blog was. Even back then (around 2002/2003) she was blogging about blogging, mulling over the genre/medium – call it what you will – explaining it, celebrating it, and patting the earth around the roots, so to speak. When I visited the other day, I discovered that she had just celebrated the 10th anniversary of her weblog.
There is something seductive about her writing, the simplicity of the page, her style. She wrote a book on weblogs in 2002, before they surfaced in the popular imagination. I remember being drawn into this curious world by articles on her site (even the word ‘blog’ was a mystery to me at this point) and telling a friend of mine, a webmaster, and probably one of the most net-savvy people I know, that I thought blogging was the future. He hadn’t a clue what I was talking about, and said he’d have a look into it when he had time.
I started my first blog with Greymatter in 2003, and then moved on to Movable Type, and finally WordPress. Rebecca’s Pocket is a weblog in the sense that I think weblogs first emerged – a kind of travelogue of places you’ve found on the web; a diary whose content depends on an interplay between your inner world and the endless random possibilities of the inner worlds of others, the inarticulable articulated nonetheless.
It’s beautifully written, and beautifully eclectic. Blogging elsewhere has become synonomous with either narrow topics, personal diaries, or simply the mechanism by which text and pictures are uploaded to a site. Rebecca’s Pocket is a reminder of what the best weblogs can be, and she should know. Happy 10th anniversary.
