remembering the past decade

– Google buys Blogger (Feb. 15, 2003)

i had never been on a panel discussion before. and there i was with two people from BoingBoing, the mighty Doc Searls, the Reverse Cowgirl, Heather Havrilesky, and Ev Williams the main man behind Blogger.

it was called “Live From the Blogosphere”. it was held in Chinatown.

everything was going well when Ev got up and clicked the laptop connected to the overhead projector to show us a website to announce the groundbreaking news: up n coming behemoth search engine Google was about to buy Blogger.

the room erupted in applause. there were gasps. and a few ladies fainted.

at the time many of us thought “oh good for Ev and his small band of geniuses, for now they will be rich.” (as Google was pre-IPO at the time, etc)

but little did we know that Ev and crew would turn that sale into Obvious Corp., which would turn into Twitter, and the rest is history the future.

The LA Times was there and for some reason interviewed me before getting to Ev. i told them who cares what i think, Ev is the man. without Ev there would be no busblog. still they insisted for a quote which i gave but later grilled them.

because the world is a strange place, of course now i teach people at the LA Times how to use blogs to better cover breaking news. And not just that but i encourage them to utilize Twitter. Currently we have over 40 blogs that consistently draw over 20 million clicks a month, and we have over 200 twitter feeds.

its safe to say that much of that revolution was set into motion in Chinatown when Ev showed us a link that said “holy crap” which lead to a news story announcing the bombshell, catapulting blogging (and Ev) to the next level.

holy crap indeed.

Leave a Reply