Back to blogging, the long way round

I started blogging around 2005, on Blogger. I had always remembered it as earlier, but the Wayback Machine set me straight: its oldest capture of my old blog is from 2006, and the archive in that page goes back to 2005. Looking back, it's funny how much of the web I take for granted now was being invented in those little sidebars and comment boxes. The early days The blog was called Blog do Mário, and it was written in Portuguese. Most of what I wrote back then was about what we would now call memes. Nobody called them that at the time: they were just the funny, strange or clever things that travelled from site to site, and I loved chasing them, collecting them and passing them on. Mixed in were bits of tech news (screenshots of the upcoming Windows Vista, for instance) and, more and more, photographs dug out of my archives. I was quite prolific, posting far more often than I ever have since. The community was not that big, but it felt more connected than anything I've seen since. We…