About the Gardener

I am an onion; I am unpeeling myself for you. Or maybe I’m Scheherezade, and I’m dancing the dance of the seven veils. Or maybe I’m a pumpkin, plump and full of possibility. Or maybe I’m a leaf on the wind– er, no, definitely not.

I started the Garden back in 1996, when mainstream media was still using phrases like “the Information Superhighway” and “the World Wide Web” to refer to what we now know is really the Intartubes. In 1998, I bought the domain Gardenofwords.com. I’ve been using the same web hosting company ever since.

I’ve been blogging since before they called it blogging. In the mid to late 90s, we called them online diaries. It was an exciting time to be a webmaster, or web designer, or web monkey, or New Media something-or-other. People did it for the love mostly, or for the possibility of a share in future wealth, and it required an odd mix of technical, design, and writing skills.

Most of us worked at start-ups with questionable business plans and obscure funding sources. We met in chat rooms and BBS’s and set up Listserves and occasionally met in person. We worked in cavernous mill conversions, or cushy office parks, or out of our own homes. We were making a revolution and shaking up the Old Guard, bypassing stuffy editors and mainframe computer giants and sending out information that anyone could read from any computer, with any kind of software. We were open source and open handed and dumb and naive and worked long hours and believed in things like stock options and sweat equity and following our bliss. The media might have called us Generation X because they didn’t know what else to call us, but we could all agree that we definitely were NOT hippies.

Then Y2K came along and broke the world. Oh, wait, that didn’t happen.

The old frontier has more houses and roads and fences than it used to. But I’m still here, trying to walk the line between saying too much and saying nothing at all.