Today I learned that a member of the really old school blog tribe passed away — Brad Graham. I never got to meet him face to face, and that’s my fault, but I appreciated his writing very much over the past decade, and I appreciated the sensibility and good humor he brought to things.
Matt Haughey, another tribe member, dug up an interview with Brad from 2001 in which he talks about his dad, and himself. You could do a lot worse than to be remembered this way.
I’ll share a couple of my favorite things Brad wrote. The first is the sheer enthusiasm that oozed from Brad’s write-up of his trip to SXSW in 2000. My favorite bit of that is his side trip to College Station, Texas to pay homage to Texas A&M. The other is his April Fools prank from 2004. I bought it hook, line, and sinker.
In 1999, when there really weren’t very many weblogs at all, Brad suggested that bloggers shut down their blogs in observance of World AIDS Day. Here was a person who had a sense of what this crazy medium might someday become, and what it already was at the time. He will be missed.
For more on Brad, check out this MetaFilter thread.
January 5, 2010 at 11:00 am
He was a hell of a guy, Rafe — people could do worse than to spend an afternoon digging through his archives or listening to some of his Fray performances.
January 6, 2010 at 3:20 pm
We’re all worse off for Brad’s early departure. I still don’t feel like I have processed the fact that he’s not with us anymore.