Vanessa Fox. Nude.

Long before there were social networking sites, there was, well, networking. socially. on sites. The site owners didn’t think about monetization or page views or how community would help their brand or their product (and certainly no one posting was thinking about links). Mostly, there were just a bunch of people, interested in some of the same things, talking to each other. You may have been one of these people in the bunch: chatting on usenet or email mailing lists or guestbooks. Ah, the days when guestbooks were for more than spam.

Even though talking with strangers online really got going in the early nineties with services like Prodigy and Compuserve, it still wasn’t quite mainstream in the latter nineties like it is now. An offhand mention of how you were just talking to some friends online might get you concerned looks and a lecture about axe murderers.

I first got involved with the potential axe murdering crowd in 1998. The web was still relatively novel but already was becoming the place to go to get information, albeit at 28.8 dial-up speed. OK, maybe it was 56K by then. But we did have to trudge uphill in the snow barefoot every time we needed to reset the modem.

I had just discovered this little TV show about a blonde girl and a pointy stick. You may have heard of it. WebmasterWorld recently made my day by naming a potential Google update after it. I came into the show during the second season and wanted to catch up on what I had missed. I turned to the internet. The internet was a little less populated then than it is now, so I didn’t have much to choose from. But I did find a guestbook linked from the official WB Buffy site that fans were using as a posting board.

A guestbook. It had a black background and off-white text. No registration, no categories, no threads. It was a linear board. You scrolled through a page of posts then clicked to the previous page. And people were talking about the show. It was smart, interesting, funny discussion. My only previous experience with online discussions had been the MSNBC political chatrooms, and that was mostly crazy people calling each other idiots (probably not unlike political chatrooms of today). I stuck around a little and read. Oh, so that was the symbolism of that scene. Ah, that was a reference to a mythological archetype. You may laugh, but there are entire university courses on Buffy studies now. The board was simply ahead of its time.

Sometimes, writers and actors with the show would post. They had a password and posted in color. It was fun, although a little startling, to write up a long hypothesis about the meaning of names in the episode “Restless”, only to have Joss come by and comment on your post. Sometimes, they’d come by to wish you a happy birthday. (Seth Green would even come by, back when he was the adorable werewolf Oz.)

The board was called “the Bronze”, after the club on the show. The place for people to come together and hang out. Posters were called bronzers. Eventually, I got into the discussion and found a world beyond just talking about the show. Sure, everyone was there because we watched Buffy, but we also talked about books and movies and what we did last weekend. It seems perfectly ordinary now, but back then, it was a little unusual — getting to know people and making friends online. And then, I met some of these axe murdering Buffy fans for the first time. I was out in LA and the band Velvet Chain, who had been featured on the show, was playing at the Key Club. I met up with andyourlittledogtoo and Little Willow and Danny Strong, who played Jonathan on the show.

I didn’t get axe murdered.

The board had a big yearly party in LA, put together by posters. And there were smaller get togethers throughout the year: the Halloween bash in Vegas, drinks at the local bar, BBQs in people’s backyards. Posters came from all over the world. I shared hotel rooms with people I’d never talked to in person before. A friend from Australia stayed at my grandparents’ house for a few days when she came out. All of us who mostly talked online would get together and — no, we didn’t dress up and act out scenes — we would drink and talk and watch movies and play poker. We’d stay up all night in someone’s hotel room then sleep til noon and meet for brunch.

When I started working for Google and got involved in online communities and conferences, Matt started to explain about posting names vs. actual names and how much of the conferences were actually about the bar. He didn’t need to explain anything. I didn’t really even notice that people had two names — the one they were born with and the one they post with. Doesn’t everyone?

I met some of my best friends through the bronze and even now, can go just about anywhere in the world and have someone to go out with or to stay with. You would expect that a strong community like that would be seen as pretty valuable, but when the show switched from WB to UPN, the board was all but forgotten. There were promises of keeping things intact, even by Joss Whedon himself, but it didn’t really work out. The amazing thing is that even though the board was housed on the official WB site, there was no administration or moderation or really support at all from the WB. It was entirely a self-moderating community and if anything went technically wrong, someone would ping the tech person inside the WB to fix it.

These days, the community alone would probably be worth millions in the acquisition. But back then, we were just a bunch of internet crazies, posting online about vampires and bad fashion choices.

On July 10, 2001, the board closed. It was a day of mourning. An entire community shut down with no place else to go. All those people were flung across the internet. The UPN did start an official board, but it didn’t really work very well. Someone started the bronze beta, which I think is still around, but it had its share of problems as well. Several of us, including me, started refugee boards so people could stay in touch. My board is still running and bronzers are still posting. A group of bronzers went to LiveJournal. Some went to Buffistas.org. Others went to the Television Without Pity boards (in those days, still called “Mighty Big TV” and long before they were acquired by Bravo). Amazingly, we all have somewhat stayed in touch and in fact, over the last month, I’ve reconnected with a bunch of bronzers via Facebook.

People who like to write were understandably drawn to a place where they could write stuff about a well-written show and many are still writing and doing all kinds of cool things now.

The point of this post? My friend Allyson Beatrice has written a book called Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby. The title will make perfect sense to you if you heard about how Dax got kicked out of the lobby of the Hilton during SES NY this year. Or about how me and a bunch of people got kicked out of hotel lobby at SES San Jose or how… well, you get the idea. Buffy get togethers and SEO conferences have many things in common, but one of them is definitely that you get kicked out of hotel lobbies a lot.

The book is about those early days of online communities and about how fandom brings people together. If you’re interested in the types of sites that laid the groundwork for the social networking sites of today, or you want to know how I spent a lot of my time during the Buffy years, or you like Buffy (and really, who doesn’t?), or you just like reading books that are damn funny, I would highly recommend this book.

I think that once you read it, you will find that I have been right all of this time, and SEO is indeed, exactly like Buffy.