I haven't been blogging much lately because my day job at CNET has been keeping me fully occupied. But I just got back from the 10th birthday party we had for the site, and it's worth a few words. CNET launched on this day in 1995, running on two Sparc servers. The site got 63,334 visitors, had zero advertisers, and became famous because the CNET television show ran a creepy computer animation of the Nicole Brown Simpson murder… over and over again.
I started at CNET in 1996, and left in 1998 to work at Red Herring, which folded during the dotcom collapse. I came back to CNET in 2004. When I started at CNET the first time, my byline was always my full name, "Raphael Needleman." I began to also use "Rafe Needleman" (which everybody has always called me anyway) later in the year. Here's why: Back in 1996, as a CNET columnist, my name was in the navigation bar. After a redesign that narrowed the nav bar a few pixels, "Raphael Needleman" was too big to fit. The designers didn't want to wrap me to two lines or change the font size, so after an appropriate period of whining, I relented and changed my nav bar name to Rafe, which I've gone by ever since.
Even though CNET made me change my name, I still think it's a great place to work. Here's me on the site then and now.
