At the time, he was still pretty fresh off of getting chewed up and spit out by the child star industrial complex, put through the Hollywood wringer (along with various other emotional ones) by an unloving father and a mother who saw him as little more than a pawn to redeem the failure of her own acting career. Into the digital breach, Wil Wheaton launched his own self-designed, self-coded blog. You either had to build the thing yourself from the ground up, or have someone who could do that do it for you.Īnd in the almost incomprehensibly different world of 2001, that’s exactly what Wil Wheaton did. You weren’t yet able to do what I did, which was find a website that would accommodate your modest hosting needs, pay a year upfront to gain access to the WordPress suite, find a layout you like, maybe tweak it a bit, and start pounding out the words. But a blog that was on its own website was a different animal.

Still, there’s a halfway decent chance more people cared about that blog than this one. This, I now realize, of course, was exactly as much an act of ego as assuming anyone cared about the minutiae of my day-to-day life in the first place. It was one of the first personal pages I ever purged from the Internet, if not the first, fearing the long-term ramifications of later discovery. I speak mainly of blogs that were on their own websites, though LiveJournal and Xanga added their own flavor to the online stew by bringing the concept to a less tech-savvy crowd, giving those who fancied themselves the stars of their own lives a spotlight to shine on themselves. Google had already pulled out to the front of the search engine pack, but was also still-at least nominally-trying to Not Be Evil.Īnother major difference was that blogs had a lot more cachet in those days. Forums existed, but there was no Reddit yet. There was no Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok. There was no Facebook, no Twitter, not even MySpace yet. Social media was almost literally nonexistent. It might not seem like that long ago to some of us, but the Internet of 2001 was an entirely different Internet from today’s.

Wil wheaton just a geek