Now we are six

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy biiiiiirthday, Pop Culture Junk Mail

Haaaaappy biiiiirthday to youuuuuuuuuuu!

PCJM turns six today. Six! A first-grader! And like mothers who retell the story of their child's birth, I need to retell PCJM's birth story.

I was living in Minneapolis, working as restaurant editor for the Microsoft-owned city guide site, Twin Cities Sidewalk. I loved my job and my co-workers, and I'd taken to emailing friends and co-workers regularly with goofy sites I came across.

That summer, it was announced that Microsoft had sold Sidewalk to Citysearch. We were all going to have to apply for jobs anew with Citysearch, there wouldn't be enough jobs for all of us, and we'd have to take pay cuts if we remained employed. I applied and was offered a job, but ended up rejecting it when I was offered a job as online arts and entertainment editor at StarTribune.com, the Web site of the state's biggest newspaper, instead. I would spend three fun years there before Rob and I took deep breaths and took the plunge, moving to the West Coast (Seattle) to work for Microsoft and MSNBC.com, respectively.

But I didn't know any of that the August day I came home, with the news of my upcoming layoff weighing on me, and told Rob I wanted to start a Weblog. I just knew that when I was no longer working with my Sidewalk crew, I would miss them, and I would miss constantly sharing goofy Web links with them. He helped me set up the site, and the name just kind of came to me. I knew I'd be focusing on pop-culture links, and the "junk mail" part came from what I feared. I was starting to worry that I was overloading my friends with emailed links, that they were thinking of my frequent missives as junk mail, and I didn't want that to happen. I knew if I presented those pop-culture links in Weblog form, only those who chose to seek the site out would come visit, and it couldn't in any way be perceived as junk mail. Hence the long, four word Weblog name: Pop Culture Junk Mail.

Six years have seen a lot of changes, including the cross-country move, and yet PCJM has continued to be a fun break for me. Sometimes I don't update for a few days, but that's fairly rare. Sometimes I babble, sometimes I repeat myself, sometimes the tech end of things throws a wrench in the works. But it's six years, and if you're not sick of me, I'm not sick of you. Thanks, as always, for reading.