My mid-aughts PC World Techlog tech blog, available again at last

Gone from PCWorld.com and tough to find even on the Wayback Machine—but indexed here.
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Apologies for the continued self-indulgent excavation of my own work, but after indexing my TIME.com columns and preserving my tweets, I’m back with links to the 952 posts I wrote for my PC World blog Techlog between 2004 and 2008. Until now, I’ve considered them to be more or less lost. At some point after I left PC World, the publication decided to pull the plug on its blogs, which were hosted on an increasingly archaic platform called Moveable Type. I’m not postive when it happened—possibly during a redesign of the site in 2012—but was ages ago. And I might have been the only outsider who noticed or cared.

Even the Wayback Machine’s copies of the blog were broken, due to its inability to deal with the navigation menu we’d constructed. If you found one Techlog post, there was no obvious way to click around to all the other ones. All you got were broken links. Recently, though, I made a discovery. By manually editing the Wayback URLs, it was possible to get to all my blog posts after all. They were all there—just hidden, as if they’d been stored in rooms without any doors or windows.

I am not inordinately proud of these posts, none of which I’d rank among the 50 things I’m most pleased to have written. But I will take credit for convincing PC World to get into blogging, back when some of the people who worked at old-school media companies still scoffed at blogs as being insufficiently lofty journalistic enterprises. I still have an April 2003 email in which I hatched a plan to prioritize the project with my colleague Matthew Newton, who still blogs; it took another year before Techlog went live. It became quite popular, as did other blogs we launched thereafter.

I was in charge of PC World editorial at this point and didn’t consider Techlog to be one of my primary responsibilities. Looking at the timestamps, I see that I often published early in the morning, in the evening, and on weekends. But I did love writing at web speed, working without a net, and getting instant feedback from commenters. Even as PC World’s editor, my print column—which I renamed Techlog to match the blog—was subject to multiple layers of editing and a weeks-long production cycle. With the blog, when something popped into my head, it was almost easier to write it than to surpress the urge. Google News was ridiculously kind to PCWorld.com stories, and I could just about make my posts pop up at the top of its headlines at will.

Looking back, I’m reminded that this was a fun period to be blogging about personal tech. I covered the launches of Gmail and the iPhone, plus stuff that seemed to matter at the time, such as Google Gears and UMPCs. I wrote a ton about Firefox, one of my favorite products from this period. Once I figured out Twitter—not so easy a feat at the time—I wrote about it, too. Maybe best of all, I liveblogged several Steve Jobs keynotes—how I miss doing that.

What follows is a reverse-chronological index of all my Techlog posts. Sadly, some of the images have disappeared, as have all the embedded videos. But the text is intact, and along with linking to all of it on the Wayback Machine, I’ve added some interjections of historical context. As with all my old stuff I’m reviving here, I don’t expect you to dig in. But it’s kind of a relief to no longer consider this work to have vanished from the face of the web.

The PC World Techlog Archive

2008

June

May

April

March

February

January

2007

December

November

October

September

August

July

June

May

April

February

January

2006

December

November

October

September

August

July

June

May

April

March

February

January

2005

December

November

October

September

August

July

June

April

March

February

January

2004

December

November

October

September

World’s Biggest Wireless Hot Spot!

August

July

June

May

April

  • OpenOffice.org: Initial Thoughts
  • The Facts About E-Voting
    ⬆️ (PC World     was good about tackling important topics not directly related to PCs without it feeling utterly random, as we did in the article by Paul Boutin I spotlighted here.)
  • Switching Offices
    ⬆️ (As an experiment, I tried using several Microsoft Office alternatives. It didn’t stick–or at least I still use Office in 2024 for some stuff.)
  • Cheap New Palms
    ⬆️ (PDAs still mattered, but but see above for a June post in which I wondered if they were fixin’ to die.)
  • JPEG in the Courtroom
  • Downloadable Netflix?
    ⬆️ (You’re telling me that Netflix plans to offer movies over the internet, no discs involved?)
  • PC World Gets Some Glory
    ⬆️ (PC World used to win scads of a west coast magazine awards called the Maggies, which I enjoyed in part because it involved going to the awards ceremony in LA.)
  • Google Backlash
    ⬆️ (Early-ish controversy over Google, including its monetization of then-new Gmail via keyword scanning.)
  • Now for Something Completely Frivolous (4/22)
  • Me and My Roady
    ⬆️ (As far as I can tell from the Internet Archive, I didn’t write an introductory blog post—instead, I just dived in with a look at satellite radio, which I loved for a time.)

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