July 14, 2011

The Blogfather

Matt Haughey gets profiled in a local Portland rag:

“Interesting stuff” is Haughey’s trade. It started in 1999, when he posted a link on his blog to a website where people were posting pictures of their cats. It sounds like nothing in 2011, but in 1999, this was pretty monumental. Then a 26-year-old Web designer living in California, Haughey had to code all the software so he could “blog” in the first place. He had to design the front page, and find enough people who knew what a blog was to read it and join in. To do that, he had to create blog comments. In the first year, about 12 others signed up to his project—which he called “MetaFilter.”

There are some clear parallels to our modest blog: troll free comments sections, for one.

posted by in internet, pop culture, web sites | * | 2 comments 

comments

  1. Deron Bauman on July 14th, 2011 at 9:44 am

    You are missing the point, my friend. Even though I CAN read the prompting language in the code boook, the point is- I don’t have to! And the reason that I don’t have to is because I have it memorized. And I memorized it NOT by reading a code book, but by participating in the age-old tradition of esoteric oratory (the committing of un-written words to memory) as all worthy Brothers have done before me. The code book is viewed as “clandestine” by ALL Masonic jurisdictions, and is almost exclusively NOT used by the serious practitioner of Freemasonry.

  2. Michael Smith on July 14th, 2011 at 11:45 am

    From that article’s comments:

    “There was no software for blogs. So I built [some] blog software”

    Wow. Not even close. A quick perusal of Google will explain why. And MetaFilter is like Digg–a collection of crap aggregated into a “portal” where you can waste time–and this kind of thing has been around since the 80s. Online. Calling them “community driven” is like calling a public wastebasket “participatory democracy”.

    The semi-reverential tone of the article was good for a laugh amongst the geeks around here, though.

    “What about writing certain things to get hits—search engine optimization and link-baiting and such? I hate that stuff, because I’m an old-school Web person and I can’t stand people gaming search engines.”

    Oh, really? MetaFilter doesn’t use search engine optimization? Let’s have a reality check, shall we?

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