Agonizin' Re-appraisal

When I first envisioned moocat.net, it was 1996, and the Web was young. The Internet was an almost-secret club for the technically savvy. The walls of this clubhouse were made out of the ignorance of the masses. The idea that Web content might be inadvertently viewed by anyone whom you didn’t know were infinitesimal.

I proceeded to post content as if it would only be seen by a small group of friends and likeminded Bohemians. No need to censor one’s thoughts or words, so long as the writing was good.

As originally conceived, moocat.net ran as a literary magazine from August 2001 through March 2007. As the juggernaut of Web accessibility grew over the 2000s, I put out fewer and less frequent “issues,” and by the time I put out the last, devoted to the (wrongly presumed as cutting-edge) posting of videos on the World Wide Web, moocat.net had been soundly eclipsed by Youtube, WordPress, Flickr, GoDaddy, and, yes, The Facebook. My original “blogs,” sent out as email “e-logs” to a small group of friends as I traveled the world in 1995-96 were now something that Any Schmo could do. The clubhouse had been overrun.

I’m older now, working earnestly on the career track and thinking mostly about my family. I can no longer indulge the willful disbelief that anything I’ve written and posted to moocat.net might be Googled and found objectionable by potential employers, erstwhile stalkers, and just about anyone seeking to check me out.

And so, for now, the moocat naps. He will return, once I’ve figured out how to recode the site so that anything potentially controversial can be viewed only by invited guests, a la “Facebook.”

In the meantime, all the great content contributed by many writers and artists will be preserved. The moocat is not just me but is composed of the wonderful creative work of many contributors, to wit: