Bay Area’s News

The photo here has been occasionally called the “Solvay Conference Photo of Web 2.0” or “The Blogosphere’s Great Day in Harlem Photo” and for a while it was my most-viewed and most-tagged photo on the then-new photo-sharing platform flickr.

The occasion was a small conference named “WebZine 2005” - a collection of early bloggers. Local non-network TV wanted to do a “forum” segment about this newfangled Web2.0 and invited a bunch of us to tour their nearby studio. They set us up to record in the newsroom and I handed the videographer my SLR, asked for an extra wide snap, and ran back to crouch in the front of the crowd. That’s me in the black Steadicam shirt, lower right, along w/my then-GF in green, her friend Glenda, there with the blue-shirted Matt Mullenweg, behind him (pre-Twitter) Biz Stone, in front of him MJ the web meme pioneer & kissing bandit, and… David, Rich, Felix, Niall, Eleanor… in every direction someone with an agenda and excitement at the new Web 2 dot 0h, still in days when the degrees of real-world separation (“in meatspace” was the trending term) were still few and where everyone was promised that they could be a publisher: when platforms like Moveable Type and Matt’s new WordPress would allow every voice to find an audience, freed from ads and corporate publishing gatekeepers.

A few of these folks have prospered and become founders of today’s platform-centric and algorithmically-gatekept web. A fair number have become tech and culture writers. Not surprising, as many 2005-era bloggers were aiming for writing careers, seeing blogs as a foot in the pre-existing publishing door. A couple of them here hold up their books. Some of these faces I still see occasionally, many have faded into what from my perspective seems to be obscurity.

It’s hard to guess future trajectories. I remember other attendees who didn’t make it to the KRON-TV forum, people who became much better-known in the Silicon Valley than just within web-engineering circles, such as Tantek Çelik, or Chris Messina (and Tara Hunt, who had arrived in SF just a week or two before). I recall Lawrence Lessig wandering through, and a lunch chat with Justin Hall about the new star-ranking system of pre-Google YouTube (playlists were still in the future). Jacob Appelbaum and EFF lawyers were already raising privacy flags. Among the nerdy segment of the attendees, there were a lot of excited whispers about AJAX. One conference sponsor offered (via AJAX, probably) a method to place and exchange ads onto blogs. I met an extremely pretty young blonde who seemed to appear only on the first day of the conference to have her photo taken in front of the venue. I was told by a friend that the blonde had a huge blog readership: her site mostly consisted of her shopping and travel selfies. “Ford just bought me a car!” she gushed. “It's really cute! I just have to show myself driving it.” Trajectories.

Within the next year or two, Google purchased Youtube, Twitter launched as the toast of that year’s SXSW, Facebook found its valley financiers, Flickr’s “interestingness” score was granted a patent, and many of these indie voices were overwhelmed in the noise and the demands for growth metrics.