Webby

It was five o’clock in the morning in 1999—possibly 1998, but who’s counting?

I was up an hour earlier than necessary because I was finally getting the Internet back. I’d been offline for a day or two while waiting for some mysterious piece of equipment to arrive. A modem? An ADSL box? I no longer remember. What mattered was that my phone line was finally being liberated.

Back then, being online meant tying up the phone. If I was surfing the web, nobody could call me—and I spent far too much time online. Everything was connected, my provider had promised the service would be active, and sure enough, I got online without any trouble. Then came the surprise.

My friendly Internet provider, Telia, had decided that I needed a new email address. This wasn’t entirely bad news. Up until then they had insisted on wonderfully cumbersome addresses that looked something like:

firstname.lastname@0455-12345.telia.com

Apparently they had finally realized that this wasn’t the pinnacle of user-friendly design, because now customers could choose their own address.

The problem was that it was five o’clock in the morning, I hadn’t had enough coffee, and I was suddenly expected to come up with something clever.

I didn’t necessarily want my own name.

I wanted something snazzy.

I don’t remember what I tried first, but eventually I typed:

webby

To my astonishment, it was available. At the time I thought I was being tremendously creative. I liked ducks, and I liked the World Wide Web, so “Webby” seemed like the obvious choice. And just like that, it stuck.

This all took place in Sweden, where nobody associated ducks with the word “web.” Later, when I tried to use the name elsewhere, I discovered that the rest of the world had rather different ideas. Still, I could never quite let it go. It perfectly captured my two enduring obsessions:

• Ducks
• The Web

More than twenty-five years later, it still feels like me.

So when the opportunity arose to revive this old WordPress site—originally created in 2026—it felt only natural to bring Webby back to life.

For many years I had to settle for “Webby’s” with the possessive s. Close enough, but never quite right. These days, with the .me domain attached, I can choose to interpret it more generously:

Webby’s.

Or, if one is feeling charitable:

Webby is me.

The only place I ever managed to get plain old webby was with my Swedish Internet provider all those years ago.

Until now.