An anniversary of sorts... Heya, back again. ;] Interesting how things can creep up on yas. Heh heh - life is what happens while you're making other plans. ;] This marks roughly a full year of this column, counting all of the twice a week ones before we went weekly, and the infrequent missed week here and there. Roughly 52 odd weeks of this stuff... And they're ALWAYS pretty odd weeks around this place. *snicker* 64 episodes of Ironbear goes to da Forii. Whoda thunk it... What a long, strange stretch it's been, too... As near as I can recall, my first login here was very near the end of April 2000. We had something like 15,000 members, and the usual "X # of surfers currently online" was generally around 200+, max, at peak times. A whole different critter now, eh? Since that time, the galleries haven't precisely grown - they've exploded. You could at one time upload your obligatory "3 a day" and they'd actually stick in the first two pages long enough to get seen... now, on a slow day, something uploaded in the morning is six pages deep by midnight. The number of images has multiplied along with the general pop. ;] This isn't really going to be an analysis of changes so much as a catalog of them... there's way too many to do any kind of analysis justice in a few short paragraphs. Or even in a few long paragraphs. One of these days, it might be interesting for someone to do a full treatment on the growth of a website. To do it right... it would have to include perspectives from all of the people who've been along for the ride from the beginnings. The major players at least. I'd love to read that myself - I wasn't in on the beginnings. I'm a latecomer to this scene, after all. Just in the roughly two years I've been around, things have been moving at speed. In that time, we've seen: the firing of a complete staff of site admins/mods that led to a major site war, and at least one new community arise from that event. One anyway that can trace it's birthing to those events. Possibly more that came about indirectly. New forums have come and gone. The Hardware and Technical forum, World Builder Forum, Gaming Graphics, Render Wars, Macintosh, and many others weren't even blips on the horizon two years ago. Some of those have flourished, some haven't... some evidentally served a need while others "seemed like a good idea at the time". ;] Heh - interesting how many things happen because "it seemed like a good idea at the time". Sometimes it works. Sometimes it fails spectacularly. And those are always amusing too... at least from my semi warped perspective. ;] Maybe we should make that the site motto? "It seemed like a good idea at the time *shrug*". We could graven it under the logo... Sometimes major site events started off as an off the wall forum thread that no one thought much about at the time, untill.... The Render Wars were one of those. If you dig through the archives of this column, you'll find the full details of how that one happened. I seriously doubt even the origionators of that one thought it'd catch on, much less grow into it's own forum and site fixture. Evidentally TIO was the right man at the wrong time. ;] Moderators and site personnel have come and gone with the forums. Some just because it was time for them to do other things. Some for various reasons... some quietly with little fanfare, some with loud fanfare and forum wide controversies. Members have come and gone also. Some have come and gone repeatedly. And repeatedly... and over and over again, too. But I wax redundant. ;] Seriusly, revolving door jokes aside... I've seen the faces change in the time I've been browsing. Some of the people who inspired me most, like Darren Chapman, no longer post here. And some post less and less frequently. A number of my older friends have moved on to other places... And new faces have moved in. Which is not always a bad thing, mind you. Life gets dull when it's static. Still... I miss some of the people I don't see any more. Make that: I miss a lot of the people I don't see any more... But the rest of us who watch and wonder are generally still around... history comes to those who watch. And hysteria, if you watch the right things. ;] We've birthed a magazine since then... it's going to be interesting to watch and see what that becomes as time goes by. I might have to stick around just so I can keep observing. Speaking of comings and goings... the Marketplace was a tiny thing in April of 2000. We called it "The Store" back then. And that was being generous. ;] Since then, it's grown into the mighty, sometimes apparently site devouring monster it is today. Heh - at least it's consistent: it's birthing was surrounded with controversy, and it's stayed true to form ever since. Commerce is like that - it tends to spark discussion and change. And sometimes the tail wags the dog... My views on wether it's a good thing or no tend to vary a lot on just how much it dominates the other business and areas of the site. Still, for good or ill, that's one of the inevitable changes that's come to the face of the net and the community. Commerce is probably here to stay. As a self avowed net mercenary, I'm not agin it - I like money. I just wish money was fonder of me... *grin* And it takes revenue to fund all of the other things that we enjoy - from gallery space to freestuff. For some reason the phone company is keeping a deep, dark secret... bandwidth is expensive. Ideally, the store funds the site rather than the site existing to fuel the store. Either way, I think the community market is like a temporary rate hike from Ma Bell - here to stay. The point where my views diverge is the point where it seems that we're feeding it, instead of it serving us... something I think we have to watch for. Ooops. I said I was going to catalog, not analyse. So solly... and here I go analysing. Whelp... seemed like a good idea at the time. *snicker* Sherman Barnes [Ironbear at Renderosity] Obligatory PS: It's been fun. Let's see if we can keep coming up with new things to observe, comment on and snicker at for some time to come, shall we? ;] Ironbear's Featured Column (click here)