The Saturday Morning Post: Reflections

A photo that Sharon posted recently reminded me that My first online postings were on the Mirror Project, and Virtual Tourist. 

Back before commercialization of web-content these were sites that were populated with user generated content. 

The premise of the Mirror Project was users would submit photos of reflections, that the photographer appeared in - in some way.  As I recall there was a limit of how many or how often you could submit, and the editors reviewed the submissions and posted the one's that qualified.  I went out of my way to find shiny surfaces to take photos of. It was fun.  It was privately run, not monetized, and someone dropped the server, and it came to an end.  Parts of it have been recovered, but it never reopened.  

Virtual Tourist was a site filled with user generated content on travel, and forums where you could post questions and provide answers.  It started before monetization (advertising.) It morphed into advertising, tried being hosted by an online travel company, then shut down. It was huge, it had easy interfaces that anyone could use to build travel information pages,  but trying to make it pay it's way failed.  The hosting and server space had to be costly, and it was built before people thought about how to make this pay, and trying to convert it, just didn't work. 

Those experiences made me comfortable with blogging. Blogging has led to wonderful friendships. Reflecting back on it, it all started with reflected images.