happy 10th birthday cybersoc!

Ten years ago today – on 05 October 1996 – I uploaded the first webpage of what was to become cybersoc.com. The waybackmachine has a page from 16 April 1997 when the site was just a single page and the second anniversary page from October 1998. Yep, that photo of me to the left, taken from one of those old web pages, really is ten years old.

The old static website still exists but I rerouted the URL cybersoc.com to come directly to this blog when, after about a month of blogging, I realised how powerful a tool blogs (and the complementary bits you can add on to them) are. You can also still access the webzine I created, Cybersociology Magazine and a page of travel photos (and a really cheesy introduction to them) where I plead “if you visit this page or view any of the images here, please send me an email” – I guess I was worried that no one was looking.

Well, ten years on and lots and lots of people are looking at both the old and new content. I guess it helps to have a google page rank of #3 for the search term “cybersex chat” thanks to my MA thesis that, despite the title Cyborgasms, is really about notions of identity and gender construction in online communities.

The old homepage which, over 8 years, grew into a sort of portal for all things online community once won Yahoo’s cool site of the day award and, when all the pages are included, has been visited around a million times.

But enough about the old stuff since it’s the blog I’m most involved in working on today, and that most of the visitors here come for. Online since March 2005, in 18 months I’ve notched up just over 400 posts and my typepad account reports that it’s served up 100,000+ page views.

The most visited posts have been this one about Netvocates, which kicked off a whole series of posts and gathered links from far and wide (and which continues to send 10 or more visitors a day here) and attention from a few a-list blogs including the Daily Kos and, more recently, by CrooksandLiars. The second most popular post, entirely by accident, has been one about the guy whose phone disappeared and, soon after, pictures started appearing in his flickr stream showing the dog (and kids until he removed them) of the person who had “acquired” his phone. Out of common courtesy I let him know, via a comment on the original flickr photo, that I’d blogged about it here – and got a few thousands visits out of it.

The biggest surprise I’ve had since starting to blog here has been not that people find me, but it’s when people take the time to respond to me in the comments or via email. That’s one of the best parts of blogging for me – knowing that people actually care enough to post a comment or drop me an email.

This blog has also really helped me raise my profile at work. I didn’t expect that to happen but it has and, since I started posting here I’ve been invited to more meetings, workshops, discussions over coffee, etc than I can keep track of. I’m pretty sure that’s a good thing but it also means that today, when this post is scheduled to be published, I’m going to be on a train for two hours in the morning before having a meeting in Birmingham about user generated content guidelines then on a train back to London to attend a meeting about “participatory media” where I’m the only person who doesn’t have a Personal Assistant of the non-electronic kind. I’m not complaining – it’s better to be busy and involved than bored and ignored.

This blog has also helped me to gain experience and insights helpful in creating and running the BBC’s workshops for staff managing or creating content for the BBC’s blogs trial – a project which I have, since September, also been project managing. Over the last year I’ve also ended up being interviewed on BBC Radio 2 and BBC Radio 5 Live, along with some of the local BBC radio stations, and asked to talk about blogging and related topics on air.

I’m starting to sound like an Academy Award winner now but, before I stop, I do have to mention the one thing – or more correctly two people – that this website helped bring me. In May 2004, someone who visited my website asked me to come give a talk in Warsaw. On the plane, I met the woman who is now my wife and the mother of our child. Ok, so my website didn’t directly introduce me to her, but without it I wouldn’t have been on that plane.

My only regret? That I stuck with the name and url cybersoc. What’s it mean? When I signed up for an account on eWorld and later on AOL, I was starting to do sociological research of life online as part of my MA studies, so I wanted to have the username “cyber sociologist”. Unforunately, this was too long for a username on either service so I called myself “cybersoc” and it stuck. For years I’ve been trying to get the URL cybersock.com to elimate the need for me to say, as I always have to, “it’s like cybersock dot com but without the k at the end” but the current owners keep renewing it.

Thank you to everyone who has visited cybersoc.com over the years and, in particular, those of you who have commented or emailed about something you’ve read here. I hope, and fully suspect, that in one form or another this site, blog, or whatever it becomes will be around in another ten years.

Thanks for visiting – and happy 10th birthday cybersoc.com!