Yesterday, 20 April, was the 4th anniversary of Read/WriteWeb’s first official post (although I first tinkered with blogging in March 2002). It’s amazing how much has happened in the last 4 years. A common question I get when I meet industry people is: how did you start R/WW? The short version is I started writing Read/WriteWeb in the evenings 4 years ago, simply because I was passionate about Web technology and wanted to explore the read/write web, a.k.a. the two-way web – Dave Winer‘s term that pre-dated the term ‘web 2.0’. For a long time the blog stayed a part-time hobby, albeit one that consumed my life more and more. It was only really when the web 2.0 trend started to take off in mid 2005 that Read/WriteWeb got popular too.
Then of course in 2006 the blog took over my life completely, as web 2.0 ramped up. Read/WriteWeb is now a media property and it’s my full-time job to edit and manage the site. It is also no longer a 1-person blog, but has many talented people writing for it. Of course I’m continuing to grow the site, and there are some big plans in store for the rest of 2007.
If you’re interested in more detail on how R/WW was born, check out this post I wrote on the 1-year anniversary. Here is a quick pictorial reminder of the old days:
Pre-R/WW, this was my first ever blog post in March 2002
R/WW circa August 2003
The ‘pencils’ design, circa January 2005
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)