IMHO's current mission is relatively simple: to give me a platform to publish my opinion. Why my opinion and not yours? Well, I'm the one who managed to snatch up the domain name. (And no, it's not for sale.) This isn't to say that I won't also publish opinions of other people who I respect (or even people who I think are funny) but for now, it's just me.
When I bought imho.com back in 1997, it was with the intent of turning the domain into an e-zine, where it would be easy for me and a few of my friends to publish their opinions. The early logos featured me and Mark De Bernardi, a high school friend, chatting back and forth, although I don't recall anything aside from the logos that Mark worked on.
For a short period of time I tried to convince friends to let me post their materials on the site. Dennis Courtney's essay on fractional dimensions was an early example of this, and went along well with my Introduction to Chaos Theory, which I wanted a permanent home for. Dennis and I also worked on a spoof of the HTML specification we called MTML, or MariTime Markup Language. The main reason we came up with MTML was that the HTML tags for links are called "anchors", and we thought this was funny.
Suffice it to say, I got busy with college, and most of my friends had their own home pages, so not too much happened with the site. Some time around the beginning of 2002 (it's not entirely clear to me any more) I wrote some blogging software for my site. This was really before everyone knew what a blog was, so I didn't feel it necessary to do much besides let me post. I sporadically updated that over the intervening years, and migrated servers a couple of times along the way. (This site has occasionally run out of my apartment, but for the last few years has run out of a colocated server.)
September 2000 through the end of 2005, I was employed by Google, an experience that was amazing, but also took much of my time away from many of my extra-curricular computer activities. I would hesitate to say that life has settled down since then, but at least my priorities have changed enough that it's worth giving this whole blogging thing another go.