About

How it started

Eyejabber was originally launched on October 12, 2001 by a small group of friends who were looking for a way to decompress and destress from their jobs as system administrators, and a way to help deal with the tragedy of 9/11. The world seemed to have gone crazy and Eyejabber was our way to deal with it.

The name Eyejabber came from an observation one of us made while attending daily meetings for a major project we were working on. We were spending so much time in meetings giving updates on progress that we had very little time to actually work on the project. To break the tension of one meeting, someone picked up a pencil from the table and pretended to jab himself in the eye and yell, "I can't take it anymore!" Someone else said, "I wonder if that domain is taken," and eyejabber.com was born.

The original content was centered around finding humor in the absurd. There were stories about weird and wacky news, cool geek toys, and more than a little of the NSFW variety. You could count on Eyejabber to bring fresh content from the darkest corners of the web.

The relaunch

I'm bringing it back. I was one of the original founders — known around those parts as Lynx back then — and I started the site on October 12, 2001 with a small group of friends. I was the lead and ran it for the first few years. Eventually life pulled me in other directions, and the site passed to another of the founders who kept it going for a while. When they stepped back, the original software was unmaintained and there was no clean way to migrate the old content, so the site went dark and the archive survived only in the Internet Archive's crawls.

This is a continuation, not a tribute. The new Eyejabber keeps the name, the logo, and the original subject matter — attention, technology, and the visual culture of being online — but the voice has aged with me. Old posts from the Wayback Machine archive are being revived as fresh writing: same subjects, new voice, no nostalgia trip. If a post from the old site is worth bringing back, it'll show up here eventually. If it isn't, it stays in the archive where it belongs.

If you're one of the other original founders and you'd like to be part of the revival, get in touch. The door is open.

Community

Comments live on /r/eyejabberon Reddit. Each post has a "Discuss on Reddit" link at the bottom that takes you to the thread. If there's no thread yet, the link will start one for you.

I'm u/lynx769on Reddit if you want to find me there directly. If you'd rather not use Reddit, email me. I read everything; I don't always reply quickly, but I read it.

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