Hello, my name is Justin Hall and I've been sharing my personal life in explicit detail online for over twenty years. Starting in 1994, my personal web site Justin's Links from the Underground has documented family secrets, romantic relationships, and my experiments with sex and drugs.

overshare: the links.net story is a documentary about fumbling to foster intimacy between strangers online. Through interviews, analysis and graphic animations, I share my motivations, my joys and my sorrows from pioneering personal sharing for the 21st century. In 2004 the New York Times referred to me as "perhaps the founding father of personal weblogging." I hope this documentary reveals that I was a privileged white male with access to technology who worked to invite as many people as possible to join him in co-creating an internet where we have a chance to honestly share of our humanity.

Get overshare:

overshare: the links.net story is available for free as a series of eight chapters between 2 and 10 minutes long.  The entire 40 minute film is also available for free viewing online.

I'm also selling this video here on VHX. VHX allows for DRM-free downloads so you can watch this film on your device, on your terms. In addition, there's a "TMI edition" on VHX that has behind-the-scenes footage, outtakes and more. On VHX you can pay above than the minimum cost of the film if you'd like to encourage me.

The overshare titles and credits are both made as basic web pages, so viewers can follow up with my source material.  In addition, overshare is published under a Creative Commons Attribution license so anyone is free to remix the material to help tell their own story.

What's Next:

Today is the last day of July 2015. I began this project in early 2014, around the 20th anniversary of Justin's Links. I'm now 40 years old; overshare has been a good chance to look back at decades of evolving myself online. Later this year I will be marrying Ilyse Iris Magy in California - she's an explorer and communicator herself who aided and abetted me making this film. Now finishing overshare and marrying Ilyse I'm looking forward to more decades serving my ideals around participatory human communications.

What's next for me creatively and professionally? I'd like to make more episodes of the Justin Hall Show to explore a long list of topics deferred whilst finishing overshare. I'm fielding ethical cannabis business ideas for bud.com. Today I seek collaboration: I've spent a year or more largely alone editing myself talking about my past; I'm eager to work with other people to make a better present and future.

Ultimately, I hope overshare can help people understand more about the history of our internet and the tradeoffs we make as we work to be authentic to ourselves in public space with friends and strangers.  Please enjoy overshare: the links.net story and let's share the internet together with kindness and gratitude for the chance we have to share of ourselves and listen to other people.

This is a soft launch for my "twenty years of Links.net" documentary, exploring the personal and social costs of my search for attention through explicit personal publishing on the early web.  

I still don't yet have a final title, and I need to work on the marketing and distribution. I will spend July preparing the film for online distribution: finalizing the video's title, which will effect fonts and URLs in places throughout the film and web. I'll correct typos & errors, do color correction & a final audio mix.  Then I'll slice this up into episodes and make trailers. Finally, I'll pull off the curtain by reaching out to media outlets, academics, web historians, artists and freaks who might find their cortexes or ribs tickled here.

So this is a pre-release release; by the end of July I'll be ready to release to the larger world.

If you can watch in the next two weeks, please contribute or vote on a title here on this title voting experiment on Tricider.com - no registration necessary. I'd love to hear any other feedback you might have; here's a place to send me your comments.

If you can't watch anytime soon, you can still purchase the video and watch at your convenience, knowing that the latest & greatest version will always be available to you here through our friends at VHX.

 Thank you for your attention & support!