This site brings together a collection of my writings, radio interviews, photo essays, and more. It's the latest incarnation of a site that dates back to 1995. For better or worse, I was one of the early arrivals on the net. As early as 1993, I began posting papers and reports on a public FTP server, and later on a community "gopher" site, as a way of sharing my work with peers and kindred spirits.

2010 -
2005-2010 -
2000 - 2005
1995 - 2000

In those early days, the net consisted mostly of dot-org's and dot-edu's — people in the organizational and academic worlds. Dot-com's were still uncommon, and even sneered at by some. The idea that commercial entities would stake out a presence online seemed like a very ominous development at the time. Most of us were academics, writers, independent media producers, computer professionals, community organizers, government employees, etc. We saw the net as a promising new tool for information sharing, public discourse and community building. E-commerce was the last thing on our minds when we spoke of the "digital revolution."

When the web began to take off in the mid-1990s, I put up my first bona fide site. In addition to my writings, I posted program listings from my weekly radio productions. I was happy to get four or five hundred visitors a week.

The site was overhauled and moved to its current domain in May 2000. The goal at that time was to create a more active online presence and open up my radio archives. In the past, the only way of hearing a radio program once it had aired was to order a cassette. Needless to say, sending and receiving checks, taking credit card orders, dubbing tapes, etc., was cumbersome for everyone. By the year 2000, however, streaming media was opening up new vistas for radio stations and producers. People could now listen to programs around the world on demand.

Most of the audio files, which were encoded using the outdated RealAudio format, have since been removed.

The site got a much-needed face-lift in the summer of 2005. New features included a guestbook and a section devoted to image galleries and photoessays. I also added a page of news and commentary. Not all of those additions survived.

In January 2007, I added an RSS news feed for those who wish to be automatically updated on the latest articles, photos, and features.

I came late to the blogging scene, but I finally introduced a blog of my own in April 2008. The fact that it has entries dating back to 2005 reflects the fact that I ported over entries originally published on the now-defunct news page.

I revamped the site again in July and August of 2010. Most of the changes this time around were to the code, which needed to be cleaned up and, in some cases, rewritten altogether.

If the site looks and feels hand-coded, that's because it is — with the exception of the blog, which is powered by WordPress. The time has come to move everything over to a more powerful and easy-to-manage platform. And I'm working on that as time permits. But who has the time?

Over the last couple of years, the site has averaged some four million page-views per year. My photography seems to be the thing that draws the most visitors, especially the photos from Burning Man. The rise of Wikipedia and Google Scholar, two remarkable new research tools, has also brought a surge of visitors over the past year or two. Wikipedia, especially, has been a source of much traffic, referencing this site in several dozen of its pages.

As you can see, there's still no advertising on the site. No ugly banner ads, no paid links, no Google Adsense, no buttons requesting donations. People tell me I could make some income from the site by "monetizing" it. But I've tried to avoid going that route. I realize that makes me old-fashioned.

I'd love to hear from you. I'm especially grateful for constructive feedback — what works, what doesn't, dead links, etc. Your comments are always appreciated.

— Scott London