Lists of old
Giles Turnbull
hard disk. It's called "gorjuss-list-20010719.txt", and it contains
the email addresses of all the gorjuss subscribers at the time. There
were 135 of them, only two of which were me.
It's funny, scrolling through the list and observing how it documents
both my personal circumstances (there were a lot of people from PA and
Ananova on it, and a smattering of PR folk) and the state of the UK
internet at the time. There are no Gmail addresses, of course. The
most popular webmail domain was still hotmail.com. There are still
people using lineone.net, xs4all.nl, and iname.com - all of them feel
like ancient history now.
A shocking number of the personal domains on the list have died. A
handful remain active; the web superstars of the time are web
superstars today, but have to achieve ever greater heights of supe
just to be heard above the loud and intrusive voices of today's
louder, more intrusive, more arrogant megabloggers. One or two
individuals were subscribed with university email accounts, and in the
seven years since have graduated, made their mark, founded their own
companies and soared higher than I can ever hope to. And bloody good
luck to them, too. Others were in their first job then; now they
command the respect of wide chunks of the netosphere, and have become
freelance purveyors of words, brains, ideas and insights.
I thought about sending a personal, hand-crafted email to every
address that was subscribed to that list, just to let them know about
this one. But then I thought that would be a bit spammy, a bit too
boisterous, self-indulgent and self-important. So I won't.
But still, it's lovely to see how many gorjuss-readers of old have
ended up creating good things, interesting things, and clever things
that thousands - millions, perhaps - of newer web users are benefiting
from now.
We were at the vanguard of something. And, when I stop to think about
it: we probably still are. Onwards!