1999–2024
A brief history
It began as a personal weblog, but over twenty-five years plasticbag.org also became a place for public thinking about technology, design, media and the web.
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The weblog begins
I started the weblog on 1 November as a piece of filler on the front of Barbelith. Five years later it contained 4,175 posts and more than 1.1 million words.
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plasticbag.org becomes its own site
The weblog separated from Barbelith and moved to plasticbag.org, with its first purpose-built pale-blue design.
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Early recognition
plasticbag.org won Best European Weblog and Best GLBT Weblog at the first Bloggies. The Guardian described it as “one of the UK’s most popular weblogs” while interviewing me about online identity and trust.
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European Weblog of the Year, again
The site won Best European Weblog for a second year. The Guardian followed with a “My New Media” profile about the sites and tools behind it.
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Essays about the emerging social web
The site published three substantial pieces about social software and weblog publishing, themes that would recur throughout my work.
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Awards, and five years opened up as data
“Mass Amateurisation” won Best Article or Essay About Weblogs, while plasticbag.org won Best British or Irish Weblog. For the fifth birthday I released every post as a single data set and invited people to analyse and visualise it.
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Lifetime Achievement
plasticbag.org won Best British or Irish Weblog again, along with the Bloggies Lifetime Achievement award. A radical redesign that spring reduced the site almost entirely to type, links and changing textures.
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A public intervention in the BBC’s digital future
“Who’s afraid of Ashley Highfield?” examined the BBC’s digital leadership. Wired later reported that it was passed around by senior BBC executives and generated ten pages of comments.
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A long quiet period, then resurfacing
After more than a decade of near-daily writing, publication became intermittent. In 2020 I rebuilt the site after a security compromise, restored the archive and wrote the first new weblog post in seven years.
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Twenty-five years online
In its twenty-fifth year, plasticbag.org again became home to substantial writing about the social web, including Threads’ integration with the Fediverse and the launch of the Social Web Foundation.
2000–2020
Design history
A selection of the site’s changing visual identities, from Barbelith and hand-built HTML through to the later WordPress restorations.
