Lo these going on 10 years now that I have been using the internet as my very own therapist, I used to read a whole lot.  A wholllllllle lot.  I read blogs, I read sites on blog placement. I read about Search Engine Optimization.  I went to the extent of learning HTML, and started to learn C++ so that I could write my own code.  I was the quintessential nerd.  Because it was cool to write the code for your website and make it look just the way you wanted.  Even though you were always tweaking the code because it NEVER turned out the way that you saw it in your mind.

Blogrolls were the place to be.  A blogroll is a list of of other blogs.  And it was the epitome of cool to be put on the blogroll of a popular site because that pretty much guaranteed you a chunk of traffic.  The more blogrolls you got on, the more traffic and the potential to be put on even more blogrolls.

It was nerd nirvana.  You talked to people who were nerds like yourself and you felt part of a community.  Of sorts.  It IS the internet, don’t forget.  And you played little jokes on one another, like rick-rolling and such.  And for those of you who don’t know what rick-rolling is….look it up.  It would take too much time and lose all flavor to take the time to explain it.

But then I became disenchanted.  I went through a divorce.  I lost track of where I wanted to go, and I lost my voice.  At least the voice that comes through my fingers onto this website.  And the world changed.  The web changed, as it does every day.  Used to be that I could start up a site with a specific keyword in the title, add a few posts with that keyword in them and race to the top of the google search engines.  You get mad traffic that way.  Or you used to.

FaceCrack was another good place to get links.  Used to be that you could toss up a fan page, toss in a few comments, a couple of links and bingo…off to the races your website went.  Then FaceCrack went public and things changed.  As they should.  Hell, if FaceCrack were mine, and I enlisted the money from a bunch of investors I would be putting up an ad a minute on it.  Because when you take a business public, it doesn’t stop with the initial investments….you gotta keep feeding that engine money or it stops dead in its tracks and all of the employees are back to flipping burgers.

So what’s the point here?  I have wandered far afield yet once again.

Oh yeah.  It is interesting to see that the blogs I am reading now no longer have blogrolls.  They have links to buy things….t-shirts, coffee mugs, books, whatever.  They feel stale.  They all feel like a business.

And that makes me feel rather old, out-dated, and just a bit sad.  Sort of like looking at the picture just above here.  I worked in the library when I first went to college.  I was in heaven.  I love the card files.  I lived in the files when I was there.  And thinking of how that has gone the way of the dinosaur makes me feel even older.