My 23rd blogging anniversary

23 years ago today, I published a post announcing the theme of my brand new blog: “the read/write web.” The basic idea was that “ordinary people should be able to write to the web, just as easily as they can browse and read it,” as I put it. That thesis turned out to be a good one, especially when O’Reilly Media coined the term “Web 2.0” a year and a half later to commercialize it.

I was thrilled when my blog gained a business model in 2005, thanks to online banner advertising (including those 125 x 125 sponsor ads) and the growing mainstream interest in blogs. That enabled me to earn a living from RWW, and it eventually enabled over 20 other people to earn a living from it too.

ReadWriteWeb had a good run as an indie media business. It was owned and operated by me until the end of 2011, when I sold it to a US tech media company called SAY Media — which had recently acquired Six Apart, the creators of Movable Type (a classic blog CMS that rivaled WordPress during the 2000s). RWW actually used Movable Type, so that was one of several reasons I thought SAY was a good fit.

As I chronicled in my memoir about building and running RWW, I had hoped selling to a US company would enable it to scale further and thus compete better with the TechCrunchs and Mashables of the tech blogging world. Unfortunately that didn’t pan out. Soon after I left the business, in October 2012, SAY changed the domain to readwrite.com. In hindsight, that was a marker for the end of ReadWriteWeb as I knew it, and as many of you who were around in Web 2.0 knew it.

For a few years after the sale, I continued to celebrate the anniversary of the first post. However, as the years went on, the site moved further and further away from what I’d built. SAY Media offloaded it in early 2015, and it’s had 2 or 3 more owners since then. The less said about the current version of the site, the better. What remains of RWW now is just a hollowed out husk of a brand, and the domain name SAY bought.

So why do an anniversary post this year? Because I’ve come to realize that it’s not what RWW turned into that is worth writing about (or indeed, giving any attention at all to). What I want to celebrate is twofold. Firstly, that day 23 years ago was the real start of my career — it literally gave me a purpose in my professional life. For me personally, that’s worth a toast. But secondly, RWW existed for nearly 10 years — and I like to think it had some impact on the web community during that time.

So, cheers to RWW — and if you were a reader back in the day, cheers to you as well.