About “Behind the Curtain: September 17, 2000” Note from bk, March 28, 2004: I recently found this old documentary project hiding on my hard drive, unseen for years. We had posted it to the XPLANE site in 2000, but over the course of several site redesigns it got lost. Today I (quickly) reformatted it and am reposting it here on my personal site simply to get back onto the Web. 
From the Behind the Curtain site: “What the 'Behind the Curtain' project is... on September 17 and 18 of the year 2000, over 150 webloggers coordinated to photograph 24 hours in their 'normal' lives. Because all webloggers have careers in addition to our roles as webloggers, we had to flex the time to allow everyone to pick a 24 hour period within that original September 17/18 timespan. But in the bigger picture, we've bypassed the publishers, photographers, distributors. we've taken the control into our own hands and documented ourselves. For who knows weblogging better than we?”Anyway, I thought it would be cool to document all of XPLANE, not just me and xBlog — which in hindsight is pretty serendipitous because XPLANE has changed a lot since September 2000. Most of the people you'll in the photos see no longer work there. So this is a rare, if none-too-deep, snapshot into the “early” growth period of a cool company. Despite the fact that I signed us up for the project and we both took most of the pictures, Jeff Lash really did the bulk of the work: He formatted all the photos, wrote all the captions and designed and coded the original presentation (Hi Jeff!). -bk Here's Jeff's intro from when we originally published this [with notes by me]: Behind the Curtain was the brainchild of weblogger Garret Vreeland, who runs Showing behind the scenes for the xBlog is like showing a behind the scenes for XPLANE. While most weblogs are run by one individual, everyone at XPLANE contributes [this no longer the case — I do xBlog all by my lonesome now]. Illustrators may contribute links about comics, typography, or storytelling; salespeople may contribute links about e-business or venture capital; interactive designers may contribute links about interface design or programming. This was the perfect opportunity to show what it's like during a typical day at XPLANE, both blogging and just working in general. The image gallery contains over 200 pictures, spanning the entire day of Monday, September 17, 2000. The images are not only pictures (both digital and analog), but scans, screen captures, illustrations, webcam images, and more. They include images from both the XPLANE World Headquarters in St. Louis and one of our remote offices in San Francisco [now shuttered]. They offer a glimpse into the people, atmosphere, culture, and work that makes XPLANE the company it is. So, without further ado, we present Behind the Curtain: 24 hours in the life of XPLANE. |