Nettle: one of the first blogs

According to this Wall Street Journal article, blogging is ten years old. Well. no. It's almost ten years old.

So says the article.

Well, I started blogging on June 1st, 1997. The blog was called Nettle.

What a logo :-)

The blog lasted for about a month and a week. The last post was made on July 8th, 1997, and was about the Mars Pathfinder (geez, it seems so long ago, a different era).

At that point I mothballed the blog and it didn't reactivate until August 11, 2002. I'd already started Brianstorms in February 2002 -- why stop at one blog, I thought. Nettle kept going until January 2005 when its most recent post was made. Not sure if I'm going to make any more over there.

Just to be clear, I do not consider my blog to be the first blog. Not at all. I consider Newsreport to be the first blog. That's from 1973. Haven't heard of Newsreport? Well, that's a story for another time. . .

The SUV Meme

One conference panel featured Dawkins (creator of the concept of "memes" among many other accomplishments), Craig Venter, and Bill Joy (whose demeanor seems rather grim these days). For me this was one of the most interesting panels of the conference, just to hear what Dawkins, Venter, and Joy are up to these days.

Joy, who's now funding green technologies at Kleiner Perkins, remarked several times that one of the biggest problems he's facing is a reluctance, a lack of willingness, in the marketplace to adopt green technology faster.

When it came time for questions from the audience, I asked Joy and Dawkins what they thought of the "SUV Meme", the notion that sport-utility vehicles are safe, powerful, the best thing to buy, own, and drive. How do we kill this meme, I asked. They didn't have answers.

When the panel moderator asked the panelists who among them drove SUVs. The moderator raised his hand, and, reluctantly, a bit embarrassed, Venter (one of whose current projects is to design synthetic bacteria to create biofuels) raised his.

Arrogance