Other people started the Internet. The military started off with DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Just like General Eisenhower had to use the threat of military action on our own soil to push through funding for the interstate highway system, it was the threat of nuclear disaster that let the government come up with an inter-network of communication technology.

Well, we aren't even close to tapping all the possibilities DARPA started, what has come to be the world wide web, that trinity of double-yoos. It's my Internet. I'll share it with the rest of you, but it is mine like the air I breathe.

Grizzled military contractors in their 60s will scoff at me, but I was an early adopter of the DARPA enterprise. My college had a system that connected up with it, and I latched on like a leech to that possibility of communicating with interesting people. I spent hours and hours chatting via green glowing text with all the other people who lived by the light of the computer lab monitors. It was 1990 and no one had heard of e-mail.

Back in the college days, I learned nothing about computers. I mean, nothing. I knew to hit the enter key when I was done, but not much more than that. I did ask for help to understand, I did. But I can't help it if the nerd boys in the lab dissolved into blushing confusion when I asked them to explain. They just found it easier to do it for me. Speaking face to face with a freshman coed was too much.

I repented at my leisure for not asking more questions.

But look at us now! In a satisfyingly ironic twist, I now work as a video conferencing professional. I have progressed to a pretty darn sophisticated method of e-communication.

And email and the Internet are huge and getting bigger every day. I have been able to take my English major writing ambitions and get my stuff out there. I have my own blog, and I even have been a major contributor to starting up this cool website, Blogcritics.

I heard about BC, and it fit exactly what I wanted at the time. It was a place that was designed to get more of an audience than my own little web page. Okay, so I really didn't see how it could actually make a profit, but I was living in Silicon Valley at the time and had seen about 10 bazillion start up companies with worse ideas. Funding wasn't my problem. BC was a place where I could be published and be read by more than just my mother. And I was thankful to Eric Olsen and Philip Winn for giving me that chance.