So here's something. A couple of weeks ago, I received an e-mail intended to gauge my interest in being part of a panel discussion about raising money on the internet at a conference. In Florida! No, really, I am not kidding.

I wasn't simply plucked out of the crowd for this honor, that's just not the way these things work. Somebody knew someone else, and the first one in that short chain was someone who's been a longtime supporter of my basketball web initiatives. The conference representative's e-mail name-checked this person as a way of introduction, and it mentioned that I'd raised tens of thousands of dollars to pay for travel and that I'd managed to turn a profit with a paywall website, and who's my agent? There was something about a round-trip plane ticket and three nights' lodging, and you just don't throw that stuff around unless there's a timeshare exchange involved.

It was all quite flattering, but I'm not going to do it. I could have flatly turned them down because I'd never heard of the organization, but I didn't, or I could have told them that I don't do things like that because I'm afraid of crowds (that's not true, just ask anybody I went to college with). As it turned out, I just didn't get back to them.

Since then, though, I've thought about what words of wisdom and authority I'd offer about raising money on the internet -- and what I'd have to offer to a group of (presumably) paying listeners who would likely be subsidizing the panelists' travel expenses. After practicing my speech in my head a few times, I'm convinced they wouldn't like my advice. "First rule," I might have said. "Scare off or ignore most of the available market."

Over the past year or so, it seems that the only times I ever use this journal is when somebody dies. This was brought home to me when a friend mentioned in an recent e-mail: "Are you ever going to blog on your site again? You know, about people who are alive?" My first reaction was defense -- well, isn't death the only thing worth writing a longform journal entry about? And then, the quick fishhook-in-the-mouth before the whole sentence came out... wait, that sounds exactly like something an old person would say. And I am old, internet-old. I've been on the World Wide Web for 17 years, longer than some very savvy young internet users have been real-life alive. And the rewards for that kind of longevity are similar to those given the real-life elderly: blank stares, indifference, on to the next one.

For the past day or two, I've had this feeling that the recent resurrection of Leslie Harpold's proto-webzine smug (1997-2000), by means of mirrored archive, should be a bigger deal somehow. Jason Kottke, a web aggregator who's been at it for 12 years and who makes money off his blog, pulled out the "get off my lawn" line, and well, there you go. I don't know if this is really like finding DaVinci sketches in your basement; to me it's more like rediscovering a stash of high school newspapers in the attic, and realizing that they're a lot more awesome than nearly everything since. We just didn't realize the full genius of it at the time. How could we have? We were all so young then.

Leslie Harpold died in December 2006 mysteriously, alone. They didn't find her for a few days, and it might have been longer if her readers hadn't noticed that she'd stopped updating her site. This would have been like any number of similar American deaths, but she'd written hundreds of thousands of words online and made friends all across the (far less crowded) World Wide Web. There were many remembrances on blogs and message boards in the days following. It seemed like everyone knew her.