User:Asilvering/Diaryland

Diaryland is a blogging website created in September 1999 by Andrew Smales, a self-taught programmer from Toronto, Canada.

"He launched Diaryland in September, marrying his experience as an online diarist with his programming skills.

Diaryland is an online community-cum-free Web service for other diarists. Users sign up, receive a Diaryland subdomain with unlimited e-mail aliases, and gain access to a variety of diary templates.

Yes, templates. What distinguishes Diaryland from most other free home-page services is the way it is custom-built for handling journal entries. The templates are many and dizzyingly varied"

"A few people think I made Diaryland as a bit of a joke, but I swear I'm too lazy to build all of this as a joke. I basically wanted to make a system that was easy to use for people who didn't know anything about HTML and this seemed like the best way to do it." Indeed, his decision to create Diaryland was a product of his online interaction with smart people who didn't have the time or energy to create their own home page. Smales wanted to read their words online, so he built them a tool."

"Smales claims no less than 4,600 active Diaryland members, garnered almost completely through word of mouth. (He estimates approximately 100 new members are signing up each day.)"

"Smales's grunge ethos in the eventual Zuckerbergian landscape of user commodification in social media sites, reflects the optimism of the 90s internet: trying to establish a place separate from uniformity and corporate interests."

"Even now, Diaryland is still adamantly DIY, more in tune with creating your own space without ads or compromise, which in turn means dwindling profits and an undefined marketability."

"But only part of the blame for Diaryland's decline can be pinned on Smales's 90s sensibility and lack of a business plan. Diaryland failed because it misrecognized what Web 2.0 would become, and how it would render the diary obsolete."

"For me and others, Diaryland evokes nostalgia for an earlier, seemingly simpler version of a pre-data mining internet where our stories of ourselves were something other than X-rays of our consumption habits, where oversharing was voluntary, and online surveillance was a sci-fi story, not our reality."

Online diaries are springing up all over the Internet, thanks primarily to people such as Andrew Smales, a Toronto computer specialist who started the Diaryland.com site so computer novices could keep an online diary.

"There were a number of people who were already keeping online diaries, but you had to really look around to find them," Smales says. "I thought it would be great if you could easily find them, and if you didn't have to be a computer genius to set one up yourself."

Today, Diaryland.com has 150,000 regular users _ half teenagers and half in their 20s. "When I do the stats, I'm always astounded that it's 50-50 _ almost exactly 50-50" between the two age groups, Smales says.

He has detected differences between the two groups. "The ones who are under 20, they were 11 or 12 when the Web started getting really hyped up. They don't even think twice about having an online diary; it's really weird. They embrace everything on the Internet."

Writers in their 20s, however, are a different lot. "They're probably a little less likely to be quite as open," Smales says. "A lot of them are more well thought out. The people who got married at 25 and had kids, however, are not keeping a diary." Like Bridget Jones, most online diary keepers are single.

Although half of the diaries on his Web site are posted publicly, most of the writers guard their identities carefully.

Blogger.com — which was recently snatched up by Google from the owner, Pyra Labs, for an undisclosed sum — may be the biggest, but it wasn't the first. That honor goes to Andrew Smales, a programmer in Toronto who launched the first do-it-yourself blog tool — Pitas.com — in July 1999. Smales, twenty-nine, sort of blundered into blogging as he was developing software that would allow him to more easily update his personal Web site and also facilitate the "online diary community" he envisioned. Personal sites such as his aren't listed prominently on Internet search engines, and Smales thought it would be "cool if I could just click around to read what other people were saying," rather than surf blindly for their sites. As Smales worked on the software, he posted updates on his site, prompting visitors to offer suggestions. It was a comment from a visitor that clued Smales into the nascent blogging community, and he set to work on a sister project to the diary software — a blogging tool that would become Pitas. Diaryland, Smales's diary site, followed soon thereafter, and both have grown steadily since. -- but this is wrong, Open Diary came first, and Livejournal predates this by a couple months as well.

Medium interview

"Tebbett's host, DiaryLand (www.diaryland.com), has about 175,000 registered users, two out of three in their teens, according to founder Andrew Smales."

Podcast interview

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