Twenty years ago I started a website called Nfolio, it no longer exists. It was great whilst it lasted and it, as intended, brought a lot of photographers together in a social way but this was 2002, long before a young Mark Zuckerberg started coding Facebook. One of my friends who I got to know through Nfolio, always says it was the first social site. Bless him, he is too kind but he had a point though, people could share images, critique others and there was a lively forum for discussion. This was very much a Web 1.5 site, not quite Web 2, that was just around the corner and things change dramatically.

In the end the site failed, but I never consider it to be a failure, we had achieved something, even if for a brief few years. The expectations for the site were too high, everyone wanted it be like this new site on the block, Flickr. I didn’t have the resources or the business acumen, to say, yeah, ok, let’s do it and besides, I had recently learnt I was suffering from kidney disease.

I put my freelance career on hold, had a transplant, recovered and then found a normal job. All turned out fine but I often wonder how the site might have evolved if I had investment in it…..

The few years that we all went through as a family around 2008 were tough times and the forums were rife with arguments and trolls, there were one or two people who wanted to cause nothing but trouble. So I pulled the plug on the whole project and that was that. I refunded some people their subscriptions and thankfully didn’t lose out financially.

So I wanted to rekindle the name at least, by calling this newsletter/blog “Nfolio Magazine” or maybe just “Nfolio” we shall see how I feel about that in a few weeks, I am known to change my mind like the British climate!

I’m going to post pretty often, I enjoy writing and right now, I’ve got a number of drafts going here on Paragraph. I like the idea of gradually developing each piece and many will come with a NFT of some sort, either from my photography or music.

Collaborating might be a possibility here and I think that would be lovely to do. How about sharing some photography here? Can earnings be divided between authors?

Feel free to share this newsletter with other people…

Feel free to collect any of my posts, including this one if you wish. I vary the value of posts and number of mints available based on some complex calculations, involving a whiteboard of trigonometry, no I’m lying, some posts I feel are more valuable than others, or something like that.

Want to read more of this stuff as I churn it out? Go for it!