There are no new ideas under the sun

One of the tricky things about working on the web is that your work sometimes feels very ephemeral. I started my career in book publishing and books just feel very solid and substantial. It's a bit of a mirage -- books go out of print all the time. But it feels more "real." The web, by contrast, makes newspapers (the physical stuff, not the industry) seem substantial. Here today, gone tomorrow. Sure, we have the Wayback Machine, but it's not the same.

And yet, stuff on the web can live on and on and on. I was the food editor at iVillage back in 2002. Much has changed since I left -- they got bought by NBC, re-designed more times than I can count and even launched a new logo. But bits of my work live on. I was just surfing around and I found this: What's Your Cookie Personality?

If you think Facebook invented quizzes then you are either very young or you have been asleep the past 10 years. iVillage learned pretty early on that women love quizzes and will take endless numbers of them. Of course the gals at Cosmo knew that long before iVillage was a twinkle in Nancy Evans's eye. What's old is new and old and then new again.