This week I learned that the man who taught me my first baby steps into this wonderful world of online marketing and webmastering died in May 2003. I was shocked. And saddened.

Jim Wilson, as his memorial site states, founded a site called VirtualPromote which later spiralled into the network of sites known collectively as JimWorld.

Back when frames were a cool new technology, back before LinkExchange banners became ubiquitous, and then annoying, and then declassé, I had a baby flegling of a site that I wanted to let the world know about. I found VirtualPromote one night while surfing and read these life-altering words:

“The final reality to materialize was: I was hooked. This Internet publishing stuff is addicting. Something new to learn every hour. Sleep became a thing of the past. My phone is always tied up and my family gave up on my attending things like movies and meals.”

“If all this sounds familiar: you are an addict. Especially if you are reading this at 2:00 A.M. But there is hope. You can get the traffic. You can debug the cgi and HTML. Java can be learned. Forms really do work, eventually. You can add more phone lines. Sorry, can't help with the family problems. Let me know if you figure that one out.” (link)

The greatest thing about Jim was that he was just like the rest of us getting into self-publishing back then: obsessed, learning everything he could get his hands on, working till the wee hours of the morning to do it better.

The other great thing about Jim is that his techniques worked. He wasn't a tacky sleazy marketing guy with a tale as long as your arm. He was, as my mom used to say, a “hacker-onner”, right in the trenches with the rest of us, trying to understand search engines and web rings (remember them?) and cool-site-of-the-second sites and all the other ways we got traffic to our sites in the early days.

In recent years, I'd fallen away from the site, no longer receiving The Gazette (Jim's long-running monthly newsletter) or even visiting JimWorld. Too much information, too many newsletters and mailing lists and newsfeeds and RSS and blogs and such. Despite the falling away, I felt a pang of loss, because the guy was just the best there was for many, many years.

A few others have some nice things to say: WebmasterWorld, SearchEngineWatch.

Goodbye, Jim. We'll miss you around here.

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