Happy Birthday, Über!
Dear loyal readers,
Today marks the 7th anniversary of the launch of Über.nu, the web zine I started in Y2K with Adam Mathes, Andy Pressman, Andrea Spencer and Anne Sussman. Über published on an almost daily basis for 5 years - 992 essays, skits, weird poems, short stories, and a variety of things that had been rejected by McSweeney’s. In addition to providing a daily laff to dozens and dozens of readers, Über was the home of several notable pieces of internet history.
Seven years ago today, we ran my essay, How To Become An Internet Rockstar. Because of this essay (and several others on a similar subject), bloggers everywhere started linking to my personal site with the phrase “internet rockstar.” Adam Mathes noticed this phenomenon, and in April of 2001, coined the term Google Bombing. And thanks to that, I got my own Wikipedia entry.
In January of 2002, having just returned from a year in New Zealand to find the internet economy totally collapsed, I decided to spend my free time creating a daily web video show called The Ben Brown Show. I launched the first episode on January 8th, arguably becoming the very first video blogger / podcaster evar. Not that anybody had an iPod back then.
And then, in June of 2003, Adam and I announced the creation of Über Personals - Personal Ads for Assholes. 2 years later, Über Personals would become Consumating, allowing me to sell it to CNET Networks and get rich. The most frequent story I tell about the creation of Consumating is that Adam and I created it as a joke. This is proof.
But Über is more than a series of important milestones in the growth of interweb publishing. Even though we had our hands busy accidently creating the blogosphere you hold so dear, we spent the vast majority of our time trying to think up stupid ways to make people laugh. Here are some highlights from the first few years:
Teenaged Girls: God’s Gift to Me Dakota Smith thumbs through the Delia’s catalog. Features a printable date of consent quick reference guide!
8-bit Memories Adam Mathes reminisces about all the video games you can masturbate to.
The Fart.jpg Mirror Project Eerily prescient, seeing as how Girlhero is no more. (And don’t miss the rather long list of fart.jpg references, possibly the longest running inside joke about a filename.)
Art Fags (part 2, 3 and 4) - a short play by the mysterious Chester Q. Phillips about an imaginary but realistic love affair between Dakota Smith and myself.
I Am In A Pretentious Indie Rock Band Notably predates the actual formation of PEEL by several years.
STAMOS - The Rock Opera No description necessary.
That, my friends, is just a sampling of the 992 essays, available for the first time since my web server crashed at the end of 2005. There is a lot of qual-i-tee stuff in there, just waiting for you to link to from your blog, thus making me even richer from all of the Google Adsense clicks your popular blog will drive. And on this day seven years after we launched our little project that totally change the world, I hope that everyone realizes that we were right all along and you were horribly wrong.
And now, go: Über.nu: Better Than You, Daily.
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