Back then, getting the hang of using a computer and going online was an adventure and, for me, learning was swift and simple. (And mostly due to the simplicity of the Atari ST's user interface.) My wife reminds me that not everyone has the capacity that I had for understanding and doing it. I reviewed software and was fairly good at hammering the edge of the envelopes that were presented. I wrote for several Atari-related journals, including Analog, which was published by none other than Larry Flynt!

I was able to bootstrap myself into desktop publishing and because Ventura Publisher provided a way to precode text, preferably using pre-Windows WordPerfect, I was able to transfer (transpose?) skills quickly to HTML, and transition to Web publishing very smoothly. I pride myself on sticking with HTML editors rather than site-development applications (ala Dreamweaver) to create Web sites. Cold Fusion coding has been challenging but mainly due to the lack of enough projects to use it (and not lose it), I've struggled of late to keep up.

More to the point, even on the Atari, we "pioneers" sampled the beginnings of socialware, even proto-blogs with applications that allowed "i-zines," but they never seemed to take off (nor did the Atari platform, sadly). Along came the groupware applications maybe five years later on PCs and I have been a strong advocate at ALA for the kind of community application that we made available last year but is still only slowly taking hold by the membership. I've seen the same slow arc of acceptance building with the WebCT courseware--started about four years ago, but only now seeing fruition with a growing curriculum and more significantly, overflowing registrations!

I think I understand the reluctance to an extent. As the years have passed, I find myself not as adept ... (Master of the VCR when they were monstrous big; now I cannot tape a show to save my life on the new compact units) ... as I once was. It may well be that blogging and RSS are so simple, they elude my understanding ... I don't know. Maybe, having been on committees researching content management systems, knowledge management systems, as well as the online communications application mentioned, I've just reached a geek saturation point. But I'm going to jump in and see what happens.