All Intensive Purposes

Despite all the rumors that it was on its death bed, Salon turns ten years old this week. Together with the much-missed Suck.com, Salon shaped my earliest sense of internet culture. (Thanks to whomever is paying to keep old Suck on-line.) Those were the heady days when the cover of Wired was devoted to people who were interesting for what they were thinking and creating, not for how much money they were making. With a core of ex-staffers from the San Francisco Examiner, Salon had an unmistakably Bay Area flavor, and, more than anything else, was responsible for the sense I got that something interesting and different was happening there with this high-tech stuff. Within a few years, people were getting rich, and now it's hard to remember a time when internet culture wasn't wrapped up in stock options and reat estate speculation, but back before that, Salon was there. I won't quite say that Salon is the reason I moved there, but I didn't know a lot else about the area.

I haven't read Salon regularly for a few years now, but maybe I should, and I'm glad it's still around.