Steve Gilliard, 1966-2007
One of the most hard-charging bloggers around, Steve Gilliard, has died at the all too early age of 41.
Steve was a veteran of Silicon Alley, having started NetSlaves to chart the underbelly of the new dot-com workforce. Some folks called him the original blogger, before the genre was invented, with his first political commentaries in his frequent comment-posts under his real name at F***edCompany.com in 1999, and thereafter NetSlaves and beyond. He was one of the first guest bloggers on Daily Kos in 2003 and helped with its meteoric growth before starting up his own site, The News Blog. He was one of the earliest bloggers to actually read what was going on in Iraq and see how bad it was going to become.
He’d been in poor health for a while, but it was widely hoped that he would pull through. Many of us at ComicMix read his work regularly, and loved his passion and his take-no-prisoners style– I think I even described it once as, "Think Harlan Ellison, but angry."
Our condolences go out to Jen.
I met Steve through Usenet’s alt.showbiz.gossip group, and he was the best kind of virtual friend. He helped me snipe at an evil boss on netslaves, and he helped me get a job. Last fall, we planned to get together and talk about comics in real life, but he wanted to wait until after the electiton. *sigh*
This I cannot believe …My dad suffered a setback two weeks ago; they found a 1.5 cm tumorous spread of the lung cancer into his brain and had to operate to remove it. He's doing OK, but his left side still isn't under his control. I guess this is the way it's going to be for the time he has left. Truly a bad time in my life.