marking the passage of time

December 24, 2003

In real life, there is nothing like a small child to help you remember the passage of time. Ever since Thanksgiving, I have heard the daily refrain “I wish Christmas was tomorrow.” Finally it is. Between then and now, time has passed both quickly and slowly. Grown-up activities seem to whiz by, while the moments of glue and colors, flour and sugar, paper and scissors stretch into forever.

People always said that internet time moved quickly. A few months on the net was like a year of normal time. The pace of software development increased with smaller, more frequent releases. Innovation became disposable. “That’s so last week,” was a standard tongue in cheek response.

In other ways, it seemed that time didn’t pass at all. When I first started regularly browsing the web in 1995, it felt like an ever-present representation of NOW. Unlike paper publications, whose back issues collect on library shelves and coffee tables, a web site shows what’s on the server at the moment. Unless the publiser tooks archival steps, yesterday’s news no longer existed.

The folks at the Internet Archive are working to ensure that we can still find yesterdays’ news. This unique endeavor strives to compensate for unusal nature of the digital web. We can resurrect the past through the magic of the wayback machine, but it doesn’t change our experience of the web.

Weblogs capture the passage of time. Fundamentally different from traditional website publishing, every entry has a date and time, and achiving is automatic. The experience changes for both the reader and the publisher. Its a small place in my grown up life of software development and internet time where I can recapture the feeling of scissors and construction paper, glitter and glue. As I write an entry, time can stand still for days. My desktop is strewn with web pages, useful references and distractions. I collect and discard links. I read and I think. I string together ideas as paragraphs in a web form. It is one of those unexpected reasons to keep a web log.