I like the beginning of things. I noticed not too deep into my teens that the best part for me of a first date was often the walk to the girl's house - before being distracted by aspects less thrilling than a common interest: her family, the "us" and the eventual prospect of getting the boot.   Some I dated might agree that I should have stuck to the walk.

When thinking about this blog over the last few days, I started wondering about their beginnings. When listing all the obvious successes of the internet - email, eBay, Google - things like personal pages had not struck me as up there, despite spending more than a year posting comments to a circle of them authored by folks located in my old home of Prince Edward Island.

Now that I have opened up these pages, I wanted to know where they started to see if there was something back there to which I ought to be true. Quite quickly I came across what is called the first weblog I think from January 1992. As I said here, I had forgotten that the weblogs were basically indexes of favorites, like Netscape what's new, presenting the encapsulated new details of the whole new world.

Looking at the back of my wood burning PC, I noticed something interesting: the date of its birth, March 19, 1996 - pretty much when personal blogging grew out of indexing when topical bulletin boards were much more the thing: hey, there I am, six years ago, talking about draining the celler before the move to PEI.

So what is new about this? We are doing much what we have all along.   Talking about stuff.   Stuff we like with people who we like.   Once I ran an old friend's email though Google and found a wack of posts about home aquariums - I never knew he cared.

What do I get from this: while the bells and whistles are nice, they can distract from that first thing that drew you to the web - yapping with the likeminded.   A shared interest.