My weblog turns seven years old this year, and it all started with a scam email I received back in December 2000. More on that below, but first this:
\nA 107 year-old woman in Australia now has a blog. She has someone type it for her, but it is amazing nonetheless. Despite being 107, she goes swimming and drinks shandy (a beer\/lemonade mix, or what in Austria [sic<\/i>] is called Radler<\/i>). Check it out: The Life of Riley<\/a>.
\nI maintained something similar to a blog on my website from 1998 until 2000. When my account at Tripod disappeared in 2000, I lost all of those entries.
\nXanga, now one of the most successful blogging sites, publicly launched in November 2000, and allegedly (and I believe it) launched a persona called Bianca Broussard. Bianca was supposedly a school teacher, and her blog featured daily stories about the “kids in her class.” What Bianca really was (again, unproven, but it speaks for itself), was a spam machine that sent out thousands of emails to members of Angelfire, Tripod, and GeoCites, free website hosts, the last of which I was a member of. The only variable of the emails was the name in the subject and salutation, which was simply the username on the host of the addressee. On December 29, 2000, I received the following email:<\/p>\n
I started my weblog that evening, with the following post:<\/p>\n