xBlog: The original visual thinking weblog

On this day, in 1999, I let xBlog out.

Those were some wildly fun days at XPLANE and in the nascent blog world back then (they still are, but we’re all much more grown up now, and those worlds have gotten so much bigger than we could have imagined).

I started xBlog as an internal resource for the folks at XPLANE. As the “web guy” back then, I was sort of like the in-house “Seen it” version of Anil Dash. If someone said they needed to draw Singapore’s flag, I sent them a link. If someone wanted to find an Isotype library, they asked me. And so on. So I started saving and sorting those links, and soon released it to the world as xBlog | The visual thinking weblog.

I’d been reading Kottke and peterme and CamWorld and Mr. Pants and BradLands and Obscure Store for what seemed like forever, and had been wanting to launch a weblog since well before Peter upchucked that (in)famous little info tidbit.

So, with a Mac, a copy of Fetch, a text editor, a browser, and some help from my buddy Jeff Lash, I FTPd and bunch of HTML files to a server and launched xBlog on November 7, 1999.

xBlog as it looked in 1999 when it first launched. The design was used until 2001.

Gratifyingly, it pretty much was an immediate hit with designers (well, with the designers that weren’t ignoring the internet). How ridiculous is it that in September 2000 xBlog was ranked the 32nd most-linked blog in the world?

Ahead. Of. Zeldman.

Totally ridiculous!

Anyway, I went to SXSW in 2000 and thanked Ev and the Blogger crew for the work they were doing. I still have the t-shirt I got at the blogging panel. Since then, so many amazing people have done so many amazing things using Blogger and the variety of other tools that came around. Blogs have been glorified, vilified, debated, loved, abused and studied. No one can argue whether or not they’re here to stay anymore.

Anyway. I started xBlog as a hand-coded linkblog and it seems I stuck to my guns in that respect more defiantly than I have with anything. I linkblogged my way through the 2000 election, the dotcom crash, September 11, the Columbia space shuttle disaster, the Indonesian tsunami, Katrina and the U.S. housing crisis. I linkblogged through Enron, Google’s IPO, and the iPod, iPhone and iPad. I linkblogged through Iraq and Obama and Facebook and Twitter. I was committed to linkblogging. I even updated xBlog by hand until switching to WordPress in 2003.

Linkblogging made sense back then. And it made sense for a long time after that because it helped make sense of the incredible amount of info out there on the web. But for a while now I’ve been itching to open it up and do something new. So XPLANE has slowly and quietly started publishing original content here at xBlog — and not just from me. We’re beginning a new xBlog (the 7th iteration, if you’re just counting redesigns) and it’s an experiment I’m pretty excited about. There’s no shortage of original content out there, but we’ve got something special going at XPLANE and it’s way past due to get the same special thing going on xBlog.

The funny thing is that linkblogging has already made a comeback. The Design Notes link drops are awesome. Andy Baio’s Links page has been a must-read for years. Delicious and Tumblr and Posterous basically facilitate the linkblogging approach, so its not surprising that today there are thousands of other niche examples out there.

But we’re moving on. I’ve incorporated the old bBlog into xBlog, reorganized the categories and have been encouraging XPLANERS to contribute. We’re just getting started but it feels good to wipe the dust from the /xblog/ directory and really get things rolling again.

Thanks to everyone who read xBlog during its first 11 years. This next year is going to be interesting and I hope you come back every now and then to see how we’re doing.

Cheers,
Bill Keaggy
November 7, 2010