Part 2 of my multi-slashed noun for which “theopolitical” serves as a descriptive adjective,  is BLOGGER.  Not the service owned by Google,  but the community which  arose,  mostly after (and often because of ) 9-11,  that created a genre which sparked the social revolution.  Not that there was a lack of social on the Web and Internet and various networks before that,  but the blog provided a simple interface to putting our  ideas and thoughts and passions OUT THERE and provide space  for  comments (usually) toward the end of connecting folks with common interests. 

With the publication of The Cluetrain Manifesto,  it was officially a dogma of the Web that “links subvert hierarchy”  (at least amongst those who were “Web activists” and “Web evangelists”).  That was the shove I needed,  and I resolved to get my blog rolling.  My research led me to Dave Winer and his software company,  Radio Userland.  I began using it in June of 2002,  and I was to accept the mantle of “blogger” from then on. 

The Bush administration was building their “case against Iraq” during this time,  and I was a Sojourners reader as well as a theological student (by this time,  a “perpetual student”,  having already done my two stints at two seminaries, one decade apart.  But I quickly became a “political blogger” from a theological perspective,  so I hit upon the name “Theoblogical” for my blogger persona.

I had been ,  since 1991,  a member of Ecunet,  a service much like “The Well”, which predated the public Internet.  Back then,  people used these  things called modems to "DIAL IN” and be connected when the squawks and beeps of the modem ceased.   Soon I was on COMPUSERVE, AOL, and Prodigy.  The “feel” there was a “marketplace” of presences of all the companies who had established some “place” on the public computer networks.  These services quickly withered as the public internet and the Web browser emerged and became almost ubiquitous to everything  we did on our computers. Indeed,  the Web  became THE reason to get a computer.

One of the first “sidebar widgets” I used  on my blog was “Library Thing”.  That is a service  that allows me to scan in barcodes from al my books,  which then looks up that book and uses the Amazon API to pull in information about that book,  and I spent several hours over a couple days scanning my hundreds of books.  Library Thing did “the social thing” on this data well before “Social Media” was a blip on the screen. It connected me to other book enthusiasts that had accounts on the service,  and  did a thing really similar to what Facebook now  does,  by comparing  my books to those of the other members,  and giving me a list of other users who had the same books,  and ranked them top to bottom starting from the user who had the most matches in their collection.

Now Facebook has its own similar Book collection service,  and I imported my Library Thing data into it.

This was only the tip of the iceberg,  of “Social Media” to come.

But the blog for me remains the hub of it all.  And the RSS technology (also the invention of Dave Winer who wrote my first blog platform software, Radio Userland.  I became a quick fan of Scripting News.com,  Dave’s blog, and learned to use the Radio Userland RSS reader.  It was perhaps the original public RSS reader,  and it quickly became my morning newspaper.

There will be much more on the centrality of blogging and RSS in Part 3 of this series that articulates who I am on the Net. Next up,  “curator”.