One hundred

It’s the number of people who have taken a few minutes out of their busy lives to write something on my guestbook. One hundred doesn’t seem a lot in the grand scheme of things, especially on the web. If you have one hundred followers you might as well have zero. One hundred views on a YouTube video? That’s nothing. You need at least one hundred thousand to be part of the conversation. And yet, I find one hundred signatures in a guestbook to be a lot. Can you imagine having one hundred people in front of you, all saying something to you, one after the other? It would feel overwhelming. The internet has messed up many things, including the sense of scale. But this more humane scale is why I love the personal web. You can still recognise the names of the people who interact with you, you can still remember details about them. I’m grateful for every single one of those one hundred signatures. If yours is one of them, thank you.