the weblog started out a a journal. and then people stared linking to other people's sites, or getting content off of other people's sites, and sometimes referring back that said content, giving the original author credit. then it became a competition on who could blog the most in one day. or who could write something that was always 3000 words or more.

it got out of hand.

and now, from the wonderful people who bring us suck we have plastic who's catch phrase says it all. "Recycling the web in real time."

plastic takes input suggestions from users, makes mini articles out of them, and links back to the original articles. the meat of the site are the comments, which are freely allowed to anyone, all you have to do is register. and then the comments get "scored" by the plastic staff. you'll get a grade of 1-5 on your comment.

they deem themselves "Operating somewhere between anarchy and hierarchy, Plastic is a live collaboration between the Web's smartest readers and the Web's smartest editors, a place to suggest and discuss the most worthwhile news, opinions, rumors, humor, and anecdotes online. "

they, of course link from their other sites (such as suck, feed, and altculture) directly to plastic and create a metafilter style discussion based upon the topic that was originally written about.

it gets better. the whole thing is running off of slashcode which was an open source project that was started by the creators of /. (read: slashdot) who've been pioneering the posting / news / forum buisness since back in the day.

now, here's where it gets crazy. blogger, the company that brought the ability to "blog" to the masses, fires everyone. plastic covers it. they create a thread. which links, somewhere, over to metafilter which links back to blogger, as well as the main employee's sites, who have all written about how they got fired.

something tells me that the "blog" walls are starting to crumble.

weblogs have been getting alot of publicity, as well as alot of fire, lately. they've even had their own "awards", dubbed the bloggies as well as the anti-awards, the anti-bloggies.

i mean seriously. it's not a journal anymore. it's not fun. it's seeing who can get the most links, and who can win the damn awards. the true journals have become something else.

i suppose that's the way things go. i'm seeing my own site go from something that started back in college and fan off into the group thing and the personal thing and the dead-for-now thing.

i realized that i've been posting on the internet for a while. i bought my first domain a long time back. not as long back as some other peple on the net, but still, a while ago. yourmom.net started it all back in '98. i mean, that was the first one. the portal. it's still there. everything. i logged in the other day, and was amazed by all the damn subdirectories that i had forgotten about.

then came the company. everything went crazy from there. christian was sending me the technology news for the day, via email. i told him to put it on the web, and CiCNews was born. it used one of my first complex posting scripts. but it, like many of the other "sites" that i started, fell to other more "important" new projects.

then i made more sites. i made kove.org as a listestep public posting portal. i made fake companies like phear phreeware and complete randomness like chicken.pot.pie and sometimes.nu.

i started coming up with a new domain that i wanted to register every day. it was all i could do to wait for the next friday's check to register another. i still do it. but now, i usually have a complete idea with what i'm going to acutally do with a domain before i buy it.

where was i going with that thought?... i'm not sure. but one thing is for sure. i've got a new server now, i'm trying to move everything over to it, and frankly, i can't remember half of the domain names i registered.

i'm going to have to start writing these kind of things down.