Dialogues Blog

“This isn’t a website. Or even a blog. It’s a conversation.”

That’s the idea! Jay Hoffman and I’ve been chatting a long time now, back since he began writing a series on web history. It’s easy-going talking with someone with all that knowledge about the web’s interesting nooks and crannies.

Anyway, I always look forward to those chats. Sometimes, though, one of can’t make it for whatever reason. At the time, we’d been talking about different approaches to blogging and were particularly keen on the whole “digital garden” concept. We weren’t going to plant one or anything, but that inspired us to move our long-running conversation to a blog — you know, one of the best mediums ever in web history.

We didn’t want something linear in the sense that the blog is an archive of posts in chronological order. No, instead we wanted it to start as a seed that grows into a vine that twists and turns at different bends.

That’s where the “Dialogues” idea came in. It’s all Jay’s, really. He starts by asking me a question that I answer in the form of a post with a follow-up question that he, in turn, answers in a post with a follow-up question, and on and on.

The first question is already up there, and it’s a nice little ice breaker: What was the moment the web clicked for you? I had to take a few moments to let that one sink in and reflect on myself as a web user from 30 years ago. What a great little mind exercise and thing to talk about!

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