The $100,000 Mistake.
I generally feel that I was too young and too inexperienced to enjoy the dot-com bubble before it burst. I had some web design skills, but that was really it. These days, I have the web design skills, but I’m in a better position to explore opportunities and take risks. Having said that, it’s not generally been in my nature to take risks, though I do enjoy exploring opportunities.
Anyways, to get to the point really quickly, blogster.com was purchased for $100,000. The new owner posted the press release.
So, was it a mistake for them to buy blogster.com for $100,000? Probably not. There was already a community building there. The mistake is in what I failed to do. I used to run a webring. In fact, I didn’t start the webring, someone else did and later abandoned it. I asked if I could run it, I probably tripled the number of users, and then later abandoned it myself when I lost interest in webrings. The name of that webring? Blogster(s). I even made people who joined the webring use code that linked directly to my blog at the time, a link that still works, but is no longer anything like what it used to be. Someone else is currently running the webring, but I’m pretty sure the description of the webring is what I wrote when I took control of it. A current search on Google for blogster webring comes up with the webring link and then a long since outdated and broken link to my website as the second result. Doing a search for backlinks to that old blog of mine still comes up with blogs that never updated that code. That boosts my pagerank, which is cool, but really not helpful as I never get any traffic from it.
Anyways, the mistake I made was not snatching up the domain name, because I’m pretty sure it was available when I controlled the webring. But it’s important to note that blogster.com became a blogging service, something that I wouldn’t have been able to create at the time. Now, I could just use Wordpress’ multi-user blogging or Movable Type to offer blogs, but not at the time. But my mistake is the blogging communities gain because blogster.com would not be where it is today if it weren’t for my inaction in regards to buying the domain name and developing it.
