I spent the better part of an evening talking with Monisha Martins of the local Maple Ridge News a few weeks ago. Today, March 2, 2012, the article she was working on was published - here is their online version of it.
By Monisha Martins - Maple Ridge News
Published: March 02, 2012 6:00 AM
photo by Colleen Flanagan/THE NEWS
Surrounded by four large monitors, Richard Pitt is aglow in a hazy blue. Clicking his mouse and punching his keyboard with break-neck speed, he brings up his blog on one flat-screen, e-mail on another while RSS feeds roll incessantly on the third.
The basement of his house in Pitt Meadows is a digital realm, littered with computer chords and stacks of hard drives.
“This has a beginning,” Pitt says as he scans the room. “But it has no end.”
Among the preeminent pioneers of the Internet, Pitt and his partner, Stuart Lynne, launched Canada’s first commercial ISP, wimsey.com. From 1986 to mid-1993, Wimsey was the main gateway for e-mail and other Internet access in western Canada.
His own firm, Pacific Data Capture, was behind the live streaming cameras which began broadcasting a few years ago from inside the nest of a family of bald eagles.
“I type as fast as I think,” says Pitt, who began “spewing” his thoughts online via his blog The Digital Rag in 1994, making it one of the longest running diaries on the Internet.
An inventory of Pitt’s online presence includes two blogs, a website or two, a LinkdIn profile, Google + account, a Now-pages newsletter, Facebook profile and a lengthy electronic archive of emails and chats.
A self-described “rational anarchist,” online he rants about government, ponders the pros and cons of changing technology, champions open source software and, more recently, began blogging about his impending death.
Read the original for the rest
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