Gawker’s Kinja, circa 2003

Gawker has rebranded their new commenting system…it’s now called Kinja. The name is recycled from a project that Nick Denton worked on with Meg Hourihan starting in 2003. Kinja 1 was an attempt to build a blog aggregator without relying solely on RSS, which was not then ubiquitous. Here’s a mockup of the site I did for them in late 2003:

Luckily they got some real designers to finish the job…here’s a version that 37signals did that was closer to how it looked at launch.

Where is the team that worked on that Kinja? Nick’s still hammering away at Gawker, Meg is raising two great children (a more difficult and rewarding task than building software), programmer Mark Wilkie is director of technology at Buzzfeed, programmer Matt Hamer still works for Gawker (I think?), intern Gina Trapani is running her own publishing/development empire & is cofounder of ThinkUp, and 37signals (they worked on the design of the site) is flying high.

• 37signals
• design
• Gawker
• Gina Trapani
• Jason Kottke
• Kinja
• Mark Wilkie
• Matt Hamer
• Meg Hourihan
• Nick Denton
• web development
• weblogs