Holy cow! Back in August 2000, I linked to three videos that a nice guy named Beto made when he came to visit us at Pyra HQ in San Francisco (in March 2000). Sadly, the links stopped working after some time, the site was gone, and Beto seemed to have disappeared from the web. I kicked myself for not having saved copies of the videos.
But all is not lost, because Beto converted his old analog tape to DV and used iMovie3 to create In the Beginning: A Video on Weblogs History! It's a little hard to hear what we're saying, and we're not really saying anything worth hearing anyway (I sound like an idiot. Is that really my voice? Oh my God, I'm never speaking again! Also, this is when I had blonde hair.) Ego aside, it was magical to watch this and brought back a flood of memories, especially the walk down to our basement offices and the arrival of our first real, rack-mount server.
Watch the video [14 MB, Quicktime 6] and travel back to a time when Blogger had ~50,000 registered users, when the whole application ran on a Dell desktop machine beneath Ev's desk, before Blog*Spot existed, before warblogs, or celebrity bloggers, or MovableType. Travel back to a time when Ev, pb and I dreamt of changing the world with a little app called Blogger.
And then the dream turned into a nightmare. Sad to see it was so poorly managed.
At least google was there to bail pyra out.
I liked the whole Ev handled the company alone for two years bit. I’m sure his former and present colleagues really apreciate that.
Gah.
The whole sexual harrassment caught on tape thing at the very end was particularly touching!
Well this wasn’t what I expected for comments, so I’m closing the thread.