I spent some of my happiest hours at Yahoo! working on a blog called The Spark. It was a feature of the Directory — remember that? When Yahoo! started out as a directory of web sites and a bunch of “surfers” (that’s an embarrassingly dated job title, not just embarrassingly dated lingo) used to organize them into categories and highlight especially good ones? Yep, that was my job (which was fascinating and exhausting and generally amazing, by the way). We found some fantastically cool stuff, weird stuff, stuff that people just had to see… and for five or so years we ran a daily blog to make sure they did see it. The strange niche interests, the future trends, the stuff that excited us just to know that it had found a home on the web. It was tremendous fun to work on, and not just because I got to spend some of my professional time writing and editing. But eventually things changed, as they are wont to do, and The Spark got The Axe. Some time later, something went awry with the server or maybe the publishing tool. All The Spark’s lovely links went boing… but by then Yahoo! had moved on: it didn’t care that all its old Sparks were broken.
I put a lot of energy into that blog, though. I want to preserve my piece of it. (I wish I could preserve the whole thing, but I’d only saved my own posts before the lights went out.) I’m archiving my posts here, assuming I can make the files work without having to recreate the html. If it comes to that, I’ll probably just take fond strolls through the Wayback Machine…
michelle heimburger 