supernaut is ten years old! Double figures! 生日快乐！

Ten years, twelve countries, thirty-ish cities I can remember, 2162 posts, 4405 images and videos, four designs plus quite a few redesigns, masses of recoding … There was no YouTube, definitely no Twitter, MySpace barely existed and people were still using Friendster, FaceBook had started two months previously, so no one was using that, Slashdot was massive, Pirate Bay and BitTorrent were young, 3D printers? nope! Google hadn’t even made Maps, and Gmail was exactly one week old … there was no iPhone or iPad, MacBook Pros were still PowerBook G4s, iPods hadn’t even got a colour screen, WordPress was a month shy of its first birthday and Movable Type was what everyone was using, 56k dialup was the way to go in Australia, where I was living. Sounds like the Dark Ages.

I’m not sure I expected supernaut to last this long, I think the idea of ten years of blogging was far too abstract to entertain then; blogging in itself was about to be told it was going the way of dinosaurs and everyone would soon be podcasting and vlogging instead. Ten years on, and people still have blogs. More people even, blogs everywhere. People who don’t have their own blog have Tumblr or exist entirely on Twitter, or YouTube channels, or WordPress’ own network, or LiveJournal, or on the hundreds of social network sites like Sina Weibo that was launched only five years ago and has half a billion users. Among the people I know though, having your own website for a blog is still pretty rare. Actual websites, not so much, but blogs?

And blogs that have lasted ten years or more? There’s a few blogs on my news feed that have been around since 2004 or earlier, but no more than a few out of currently more than 200. And over the ten years there have been thousands that have come for weeks or months or a couple of years, then gone. A couple of years seems the average for old-age blog death.

And here is supernaut, ten years old! That’s beyond old age, it’s like time travel, like I was born in the Renaissance and didn’t take the hint about pushing up daisies. So, dear supernaut, happy birthday! If I and the internet are around in ten years, I imagine you’ll be here too, and while I can’t yet easily get you drunk or loaded, I intend to do that myself to celebrate.