My blogosphere days

My first post on Blogger was not in 1997, which is what you might think if you look at the dates in my Blog Archive. 

However, the posts you see listed from 1997 through 1999 were from the period right after I was laid off by The Arizona Republic in one of that newspaper's first downsizings. 

I was anxious to get back to working on my occupational passion, which was writing about popular music: rock, jazz, blues, world music and other forms. 

I decided that I needed to work freelance because, for a variety of reasons, I didn't want to move my family from town to town looking for opportunities in the news business. However, the freelance gigs I picked up to write about music were horribly low-paying, certainly not enough to keep paying for the mortgage, groceries and health care. 

So, I started my own website to promote myself on CompuServe's Our World pages, and the Popmuse blogs you see here represent all the work that appeared under the heading Pop Musings on my Our World site. The site also had links to anything that I had a written as a freelancer that was still online as of July 10, 1999, when I filed my last blog on that site.

If you'd like to see how primitive it looked, copy and paste this url (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/salvatorecaputo/homepage.htm) into the search window on the Wayback Machine. 

In the meantime, I did some minor dabbling on MySpace. The only thing I know for sure that I put up there was the blog about doing an open-call audition for "The Voice" in 2013. It's visible on this Popmuse blog here. 

This leaves me with a mystery because I can't be absolutely certain whether I started this Popmuse blog in 2009 or whether I put the blogs from 2009 through the beginning of 2013 up on MySpace first. 

I'm leaning toward the idea that I did indeed start this blog in 2009, though, because that's the year CompuServe announced it would shut down Our World. I likely scrambled to try to re-create the Our World pages here, and that's how those pre-2009 blog posts got here. 

That being said, I don't think I'm getting much traction. It feels like I'm talking to myself here most of the time, but I'm hoping that my kids, at least, will find these random writings by their dad amusing, and maybe get a deeper insight into who I am and was. 

Copyright © 2025, Salvatore Caputo