Imagine the north

When I was about 10 years old I had a sleep-over at a friend's house. We got ready for bed and went to say good night to my friend's mum who was herself sitting up in bed writing in a notebook.
"What are you writing?" I asked.
"Well, actually I am writing about you" she smiled. "Every night I write the day's events in my diary, the things I did, what made me happy and what made me sad. Right now I am telling my diary how you came to spend the day and night at our house."
My friend's mum, her bright coloured pyjamas and her glasses perched on her nose with a double drape of beaded chain swinging from each temple, instantly became promoted to the coolest person I knew. She was talking to her diary, about me no less.

Subsequently I became one of those people who started a diary on January the first every year of my life (since I have been able to write) and rarely made it past Epiphany. Maybe once or twice I dragged my pen into February …

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

Originally we used to organize our blog posts by date. You found someone writing about a topic that interested you and read their most recent post. Then if you enjoyed it, you scrolled down and read some early stuff.  A dedicated reader might travel back in time quite far, and notice the posts getting slowly less useful / funny / well-written / articulate / diligently proofread until you end at their beginning with a clumsy first post:

"Hello, this is my blog - I am not really sure what I am doing right now but I hope some people will enjoy reading about my shot glass collection".

Or something.

When I started this blog back in 2008 tag clouds were all the rage.  We dumped as many keywords as we could think of into that label box and built up a bank of words that ostensibly existed to help people find all the cool stuff. A bit of code ensured that words were rendered to scale according to their frequency (commonly used tags were larger).  Then one…