When Xanga first went vastly public back near the end of 2000, there were no public xang-gods to guide us; there were no obvious administrators to clamor to; there was no one at all in charge with either a face or a name.

Abhoring an organizational void, I went to work with resources no longer available (a search that listed all blog activity by date) and searched back years into the formative non-public xanga past (1998-2000).  I found a lot of obviously phony blogs created by some person or persons to "populate" xanga, I surmise, in order to make xanga seem like a more considerably burgeoning online community than it was at the time.  Many of these blogs (janedoe1, janedoe2, etc.)  had passwords the same as their names. Bad, bad thing to do. Logging into them, I found various private "test" messages confirming, indeed, that were dummy blogs being used for development, testing, and fronting xanga with bogus personages.  They were all mercilessly assimilated by me.  (Bad, bad thing to do!) 

But there were other pre-public-day blogs that didn't seem phony.  People were leaving each other comments!  As it turned out, I made a list of these figuring that, if they predated me considerably, they might well be the "hidden admins" or, by a term I was later to coin for them, "the xangods" of xanga. 

Who were these individuals?  First revealed Dec. 30th 2000 to the xanga public here, they were John, Dan, Janet, Genius, Brendan.  Also, though I had yet to discover them, there were  Bob, Monsur, and Marc.  Genius (Biz Stone) is now gone from Xanga.  He eventually left Xanga to go to Blogger and has now left Blogger to go to Odeo (yes, check it out, it's different.)  I don't know how tight Brendan was with Xanga, but it appears he's no longer around either.

But as Xanga has grown over the years, so has its staff.  As best as I can tell, here are some 'new' faces on the Xanga team:  Chrischoi, Mary, Joel, Amy, Eileen, Jon, and possibly Dave--although I think he's just a collaborator to the staff and not an employee.

Rock on.

- end of public service blog -