24 years ago today Driven By Boredom 1.0 was born in a Penn State dorm room. I hated the frat party scene there and spent most of my time talking to my friends back in DC on AOL Instant Messenger. I was bored out of my mind, but I had broadband internet and too much creativity with no outlet. I needed a place to post my photos and weird projects I was working on long before sites like Flickr and YouTube existed. On March 1st, 2001 Driven By Boredom went live and it changed my life forever.
Never in a million years did I think I would still be blogging nearly a quarter of a century later. I have run this site for more than half my life and it’s been my full time career since 2008. There’s no chance I would have made it as a photographer without this site, but this site has not always been a photoblog.
Driven By Boredom 1.0 – 2001 – 2005:
The original site was just whatever I wanted it to be. I would post my photography of course, but it was so much more. It was a journal where I would would deeply overshare on the internet long before that was a thing that people were doing. I would post weird internet projects I was working on, memes, links to sites I found interesting, weird videos and whatever I could think of. After I left Penn State and went to art school I started managing a band called the Gaskets and for the last couple of years of DBB 1.0 it was really just a blog about that band with some occasional photos thrown in for good measure.
Driven By Boredom 2.0 – 2005 – 2006:
I am certain Driven By Boredom 2.0 didn’t even last a year. It might not have lasted 10 posts. The original site had become such a huge pain to update that I wanted to try out the new blogging platforms. Blogs were an actual thing at this point and so I let 1.0 languish without updates and launched a Blogger account. I had this idea to review stuff and for a few weeks I was really enjoying how easy it was to update, but I was busy with the band and working shitty temp jobs and taking photos and once again the site languished.
Driven By Boredom 3.0 – 2007 – 2025:
This is the site most people think of when they think about this website. When I moved to NYC in 2006 I was going to parties and taking photos and everyone would ask me where I was posting the photos. I had no plans to actually post any of the photos, I just don’t know how to exist without documenting my life. It was the beginning of the nightlife photo blog era and everyone wanted to see their photos from the night before. I figured I might as well bring Driven By Boredom to life and instead of using the old 1.0 design, I started using WordPress. My friend Adam made me a custom template and suddenly I had a photoblog that I didn’t update again until literally today.
Driven By Boredom 4.0 – 2025 – ???
And here we are starting from scratch again. My old site was so out of date and broken and full of so many people’s regrets that it was time to clear the slate and build something new, while also going back to my roots. I want to blog again, which is why I created B-Sides, I want to post old photos with new context which is why we have a Vintage DBB section, and mostly I want to be able to post photos that actually make sense on modern screens. My galleries actually work now and photos are more than three times bigger now. It’s all really exciting.
I have no idea what the future will hold for this site, no one reads blogs anymore, but I am excited to post old stories and old photos while also moving forward with new images and new stories that reflect my life in 2025 instead of whatever crazy shit I was posting about in my 20s. My life is always changing, and so is this blog. I can’t wait to see what DBB 5.0 looks like…