A Blip on the Internet Since 2004

One of the versions of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" was stolen from an Oslo museum in August 2004. It was recovered in 2006 (this image from Wikipedia)

2004!  It was still the relatively early days of the New Millennium. Do you remember anything about it? Let me remind you of a few things that happened that year:

• Facebook was launched
• Terrorist bombs at a Madrid railway station killed nearly 200 people
• The Republic of Ireland banned smoking in bars, restaurants and enclosed public spaces
• Greece won the European football championships in Portugal
• Wikipedia reached 1 million entries
• The Cassini-Hugyens spacecraft arrived at Saturn
• John Peel, Ronald Reagan, Ray Charles, Marlon Brando, Christopher Reeve and Yasser Arafat all sloughed the mortal coil

In addition to these milestone events, the Merriam-Webster dictionary picked "blog" as word-of-the-year. Back then I didn't really know what a blog was but I remember thinking that if they were that important I should probably have one. Such folly! I duly sniffed around on the internet and found Blogger who offered a free hosting service.  I signed up and after a bit of fiddling and wishing I'd paid more attention to the HTML class I'd attended in 1999, I finally published the first entry of Mad Dogs and Englishmen.  That was on August 26, 2004: today is its 9th anniversary! Needless to say, I had no idea where how the embryonic web log was going to develop. Certainly it's evolved over the past nine years. I'll pontificate on the blogging process on another occasion -the fact is I'm still here even though the average blog lifespan is around three years.  Oh well...!

Happy Birthday MD&E!