I've been thinking a lot lately about San Francisco and the dot-com invasion and thinking I should be so excited the city's ranks are swelling with internet people doing crazy web things and changing the world. But I'm not. I look around at lunch in South Park and I don't feel like I'm looking at people I know, at people who share the same passions with me, at people who get It. A friend told me this story: he met a web designer at a party the other night, he says, "oh, do you have a personal site?" Her answer, "no."
And I realized there are dot-com people and there are web people. Dot-com people work for start-ups injected with large Silicon Valley coin, they have options, they talk options, they dream options. They have IPOs. They're richer after four months of "web" work than many web people who've been doing it since the beginning. They don't have personal sites. They don't want personal sites. They don't get personal sites. They don't get personal. Web people can tell you the first site they ever saw, they can tell you the moment they knew: This, This Is It, I Will Do This. And they pour themselves into the web, with stories, with designs, with pictures. They create things worth looking at, worth reading, worth coveting, worth envying, worth loving. They create Beautiful Things. We need more of those.