Daily Inspiration Quote by David Talbot

Talbot is doing something rarer than it looks: building a lineage, not a brand. In a media culture that loves the myth of the lone disruptor, he’s openly placing Salon in a lineage of scrappy, early web experiments - Steve Johnson’s Feed and “Joey and the Suck people” (Joey Anuff and Carl Steadman’s Suck.com) - and admitting they got there first. That “They were up there before we were” isn’t just courtesy; it’s a strategic deflation of ego that signals confidence. If you can concede precedence, you’re implying you’ve earned your place anyway.

The intent is collegial and political at once. Talbot’s respect reads as an olive branch to the digital-native crowd that, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, often viewed legacy journalists as tourists in the new medium. By crediting Feed and Suck, he’s aligning Salon with the web’s original sensibility: voice-driven, slightly punk, impatient with institutional pieties, willing to mix critique with play.

The subtext is also about gatekeeping, just inverted. Naming these specific predecessors is a quiet way of telling readers and peers: we know the canon of early online writing, we were watching, we learned. It’s a claim to authenticity made through humility.

Context matters: the early internet was a small room where reputations traveled fast, and “who inspired whom” doubled as a map of influence and legitimacy. Talbot is documenting that map - and making sure Salon is read not as an interloper, but as an inheritor.