This article was taken from the May 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Nine years ago -- before YouTube, before Facebook, before Twitter, before it was easy -- Phil Gyford started putting Samuel Pepys' diary online. More precisely, he put the entry for January 1, 1660, up on January 1, 2003, and he's been updating it ever since. Pepys wrote his last diary entry on May 31, 1669, so Phil will do the last update on May 31. And then have a party.
From the start it was clear that Pepysdiary.com meant something.
Clay Shirky said in 2003, talking about the emergence of blogs: "The vertigo moment for me was when Phil Gyford launched the Pepys weblog... What that said to me was: Phil was asserting, and I now believe, that weblogs will be around for at least ten years, because that's how long Pepys kept a diary. And that was this moment of projecting into the future: this is now infrastructure we can take for granted." In some worlds ten years isn't very long: it's not if you're digging an undersea tunnel or discovering a cure for disease. But in the busy, silly world of early 21st-century media, making a ten-year assertion was a big deal -- something akin to the Clock of the Long Now.
Now, in the world of Twitter and Instagram, it looks even more quixotically patient and focused. And that's why the completion of Pepysdiary.com should be celebrated -- it teaches us that the internet has power over other dimensions than the Social Graph and the Real-Time Web, that web success can be built with things other than venture cash, spammy PR and rapid scaling. Pepysdiary.com has a community because people found it, hung around and started contributing. And it isn't about making money -- Phil does it for nothing, pouring in hours of work every week, out of love, dedication and, I suspect, a cussed determination to see something through. Crucially, it's not that modern web "for nothing", which means "no monetisation model now, but we'll build a billion users and work it out later". This is the non-commercial, hobbyist web that destroyed so many business models back then and which no one talks about any more.
But it's not like Phil is some sort of early 2000s Luddite, hanging on to an idea of a handmade web. He's not afraid to enhance things when appropriate technologies come along. It's become the definitive Pepys resource on the web, incorporating maps, annotations and community, everything linked in just the way the web does best. The Twitter account @samuelpepys has found the diaries a new audience -- over 25,000 followers -- and attracts
frequent retweets from William Gibson, the ultimate demonstration of relevance and futurity.
I asked Shirky what he thinks about Pepysdiary.com in 2012. How does it feel now? "It feels like 2003, the year of Friendster, when everything social seemed new, but now seems as quaint as a sepia photograph. Most of all, it is obvious that Phil was right, and that his understanding of how important weblogs would become wasn't just spot on, but he also imagined, again ahead of us all, that there would come a day where that feeling of newness would end, that Samuel Pepys would tire of writing a diary the second time around too." Maybe that's the real lesson of Pepysdiary.com. We'll only really understand what we're doing when it stops feeling new, when we have a sense of history about what we're making.
Russell M Davies is a contributing editor at wired and an occasional blogger at russelldavies.com
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
