Anita's Book of Days goes dark

A sort of sad note in passing... maybe you saw this in some other medium, but one of the web's longest-lasted online journals has come to an end with the death of Anita Rowland, author of Anita's Book Of Days. She started writing online back in mid-1997, long before the invention of the word "blog" and when the very idea of writing supposedly-private words for just anybody to read was just unthinkable for all but maybe four or five hundred of us in the entire world.

The last even wild-ass guess I saw estimated that there were in excess of 150,000,000 blogs worldwide recently.

Think about what it would have been like to have only a few hundred.

That was the world Anita launched her site into back in 1997. Several others of us followed that summer (my online writing goes back to July 1997), and while some people fell off the map, obviously lots more joined. Not more than a handful of those early blogs are left in their original form and name, and now there's one less.