Slashdot Mirror
Blogging Is 10 Years Old
Several readers sent us notice of an article in the Wall Street Journal in advance of the tenth anniversary of the blog (by some definitions and accounts). The Ur-blogger in this version of history was Jorn Barger and the blog was Robot Wisdom. Barger wrote, "I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff." The Journal article has statements from a baker's dozen of bloggers and/or blogwatchers and a handful of videos of bloggers talking about how and why they do what they do.
10 is also the mental age of people who blog.
We all know Dr. Doogie Howser, MD, invented blogging back in 1989.
I make a dash to the Slash to the D-O-T Coz them news for nerds makes sense to me So let this serve as a warning to the spammers and trolls You may have a fat pipe but you ain't got bawls. There's a new manifesto by ESR And the stats of the watts of a hybrid car I gots love for Perens and miguel, et al And I voted CowboyNeal on the Slashdot Poll I'm Microsoft bashin' like every single day Coz the OS got holes and Exploder's teh gay Now SCO's talkin' trash so I give firefox a ride To reply as a Coward so I can hate on McBride I will flame you with language I won't say to your face And I bet you can't guess who gots all your base There's one way to know if your server is rotting Just post a link and you'll get a slashdotting You can mod me down coz I'm a karma whore And I'm a decorated veteran of a recent flame war Where they fought about an app with a K or a G And a heated debate on what was meant by "Free" As a slashbot, when Linux receives a threat, My palms begin to sweat and my evil bit is set You best believe I'll be posting a rant And I'll be surfin' Slashdot 'til my mom says I can't.
Nor does anybody else.
"Maintained by Jorn Barger (jorn@mcs.com). Last updated: Aug99"
... much more than 10 years old.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
I still think that Virtualkid(.com, long since gone) was the site that made blogging popular. It had (free) online diaries for anyone who wanted one back in 98. Good stuff happened. Interesting things were started. Trends were set. We were there. And our mental ages at the time may have been little over 10, but they were still good days.
:).
Anyone with half a brain who was there, will see through my Anonymous Cowardice and know who I am
My son is 10 years old. I kept a series of web pages up while my wife was she was pregnant with him that were pretty reminiscent of today's blogs - quick little entries about things that happened, complete with little indicator icons about what kind of entry it was, like the "mood" icons that they use now. Sadly, the Internet Archive never made copies of my pages; all I have is hard copies.
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
Umm, Steve Jackson (of GURPS fame) has had a daily blog since December 1994: http://www.sjgames.com/ill/1994/ill-dec94.html
nobody cares.
Suck.com was publishing almost-daily since 1995.
http://www.suck.com/daily/archive/1995.html
Live simply, that others may simply live. -Gandhi
Nothing says, "Thanks for inventing blogging!" like taking down your server with a hearty slashdotting.
In a July 2005 Wired magazine item, writer Paul Boutin reported encountering a "homeless and broke" Theo De Raadt walking with a mutual friend in Calgary, Alberta. The article said that Theo, "living on less than a dollar a day"[1] had allowed the OpenBSD domain registration to lapse, but that Boutin found OpenBSD.org back online a few weeks later.
Tag, WWIV, Renegade and Telegard had a "blog" feature (though it wasn't called that).
at least according to their definition.
Online diaries are several years older.
Now all we need is Dr. Sam Beckett to step into the Quantum Leap accelerator, and set right what once went wrong.
Slashdot is not so much a news site as a collective blog, IMO.
After checking my first post, when it was not called "blog", he his right! Hey, I started in 1997! I even had pictures!
h tml
http://www.salsamontreal.com/xelaworld/mnl/qrave.
No sig for now.
I wrote myself a Perl script to "blog" back in 1995. Cause it was easier to update a website...
"BBS" != "web"
If these words were people, I would embrace their genocide
Do not attribute to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence.
Blogging is not some new concept invented back in 1997. I am pretty sure a great many people kept journals long before that. Blogging is not a unique concept, its simply one of the oldest concepts applied to HTML rather than pen and paper. In this matter the buzz word blog and ever possible tense there of are nothing more than keeping a journal and using HTML rather than Pen and Paper to do it.
Did someone say cake?
I resemble that remark!
Blogging is 10 years old? WTF?
Someone should smack the crap out of the idiot who made that claim. That, and never let him write another 'article' again.
The only way blogging could be 10 years old is if "Blogging" is a kid that was born 10 years ago.
*sigh* I wonder what real articles the SlashDot editors passed up for this story on a bullsh*t claim.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Wow! Congratulations to him, does anyone has Blogging's email to send him a message? Maybe a toy!
Thats when the wayback machine says geocities started up (or maybe when the wayback machine started?)
w ww.geocities.com/
:) no one had more animated gifs than I.
http://web.archive.org/web/19961022173245/http://
I remember living in hotsprings for a while
I've been reading Jerry Pournelle since around 1995.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Check out the .plan files by American McGee and John Carmack and the other guys who were at Id in the mid 90's.
They are at least one case of blogging before the reported originator.
Carmack wrote about "Stupid Testarossa Adventures" in addition to the ongoings at Id. American wrote about "Stupid Contests I Get People to Do" in addition to the ongogings at Id. Others "blogged" too. Tastefully or not. Steed wrote about his stripper inspired 3d models. Cash wrote something too. Brian Hook was there writing as well, in addition to others I have forgotten.
This all was documented at BluesNews.con where you could read their plan files on a daily basis.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
They were off by 3 years :P
I just lost my 5 mod-points because I didn't use them, otherwise I'd mod you up.
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
See here: http://www.sjgames.com/ill/1994/ill-nov94.html :)
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
I'm sure the *term* blog is probably 10 years old, but the idea goes back further than 10 years for sure. I know myself and others who had dated "posts" on topics dating back to '95. They were mostly links and items and opinions about a specific topic. Back then they were just generally called "news", "notes" or "thoughts" but it was not much different from any tech blog you would see today. I'm quite sure there were others who go back even further than this. The idea isn't inherently new or creative, it's just the term that was given to them that was.
Then again it all depends on what you really consider a "blog". Some people consider web logs and blogs to be different things (which may also be different from a journal, or a news site, etc). So the entire idea of pinpointing a "start" to it is sort of silly, given how similar they all tend to be.
I mean, the guy claims to have invented everything else, right?
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Seriously, check it out: July 31st, 1996: http://asecular.com/musings/aug96. and the day before yesterday: http://asecular.com/index.php?070713
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
And it will be legal.
What?
mod parent up
OK, Web logs don't predate the web but the concept of an online journal does.
I imagine the first such use was probably back in the '60s, maybe older.
Paper public diaries are probably as old as paper, and "what I did today" fireside chats are probably as old as fire.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Well, of course it all depends on definition. Most definitions of weblog require the web, but people seem to have forgotten that when Tim Berners-Lee defined the "web" he did it as a network of protocols, including http and html (which he developed) but also gopher, usenet, ftp and others. URLs were meant to tie them all together.
.plan file under finger might have a claim on being an earlier blog.
This puts the blog much further back in time. I personally believe the credit for first blog goes to mod.ber, a moderated newsgroup from 1983 that was effectively similar to boing boing today. Brian E Redman (after whom the group was named) and friends found interesting threads out on the net and posted pointers to them in mod.ber
Most blog definitions also require it be serial. There is some debate as to whether the people who kept running commentaries in their
It's possible that my own rec.humor.funny/netfunny.com may be the longest still-running blog. It is 20 years in two weeks. It is serial, started on the pre-HTML web and like other blogs, has a solo editorial voice.
Some of this history can be found at Wikipedia's blog page and I wrote about RHF's history as the oldest blog with pointers to other contenders.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Blogs are frickin' stupid. They are written by uninteresting people who think others actually give a damn what they have to say. The most ignorant comments I read on Slashdot are from idiots saying, "Oh, I bogged on that yesterday." Worse, their posts have links to their inane crap.
Come on man, give credit where it's due. Eberlin flowed that originally in this thread
Sig free's the way to be.
because that would have ment that nobody would be able to blog.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The WELL, or Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link was a forum were people were doing what we would now call blogging but LONG before the WWW existed.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Captain Zapp Brannigan,"Captains blog, Stardate 3007. You suck. Yes, you the reader of my blog."
Though I think that may be too obscure for watchers. (Hint SNL skit)
God spoke to me.
Blogging is at least 11 years old! I used to blog about the impending Apple/Next merger back in '96, posting every few days with whatever new angle was in the news.
I'm certain there was somebody doing it even earlier than that.
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
I had a fairly successful, Slashdot-style blog (and forum) with around 10K unique daily visitors (and growing). I closed it in 2001 - lost interest. I believe that with a few exceptions the blog fad will blow over. Sooner or later you just run out of interesting things to say and start regurgitating bullshit from other blogs. Then you start regurgitating the regurgitations from other blogs. It becomes sort of like making sausage - you put all sorts of crap in and hope it will "sell".
The NCSA What's New index does not seem to be archived any longer at UIUC, but rather at Netscape. That's puzzling to me, since I think it's an absolutely essential part of the history of the growth of the web.
Keith Dawson makes me wish they'd re-hire Jon Katz to replace him. At least he was honest about his trolling and self-promotion. Besides, we could have "OMG DOGGIES!" to go with our "OMG PONIES!"
Steve Jackson, of Steve Jackson Games, (best known for Car Wars and GURPS), has been running something that pretty closely resembles a blog since at least November 1994. That has this guy beat by 2 years at least.
--
$tar -xvf
It was YOU, wasn't it, kdawson? Tool.
... using simple HTML and Notepad on a Web page inside my generous 10MB of personal Web space alloted with my dial-up Netcom account. It definitely qualified as a blog, it was linear and every entry was dated. Things like dynamic HTML and CM systems were still foreign terms, and those personal webpages allowed no scripting, so it was pretty crude stuff, but still a blog! I still have that old site archived... should hang it up for fun one of these days.
it used to be here http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://spies.com/~gus /musings/aug96.htm
and before that it was here
http://atlas.comet.net/~gus/musings/aug96.htm
which might predate the wayback machine
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
To contribute to the blogging community, I've setup http://www.socialnetworkwhore.com/ The epidemy of the social networking and blogging world!
There's at least one well known blog predating that; James Lileks started the Bleat in February 1997.
FWIW, Duncan Riley cites Justin Hall as the first regular blogger with a start date of Jan. 1996. The disagreemnent about the first blogger will probably continue, but between Riley's documentation and the other examples cited here, it's clear that Barger was not the first and the Wall Street Journal did almost no research on the story. It's idiotic, since they could be certain the story would be fact-checked quickly by the blogosphere.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
Blog: Idiot-proof WYSIWYG toolset for those incapable of usng HTML, FTP and other standard web technologies.
ie: Morons invaded the web approximately 10 years ago.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
BBS's back in the 80's had threaded discussion topics. They didn't call them blogs, but I don't see how they were in principle any different than blogs. (aside from being direct-dial based vs on the internet)
And surely someone had a TurboGopher or ARPAnet "site" that posted the latest news?
Or does "blog" mean something more than "shared journal"?
80-something comments and no mention of Chips and Dips? For shame...
I'm absolutely certain (without proof) that the act of blogging predates these hypocrites!
The difference is that back in the day, you had to be well-versed in the technology to pull it off. You couldn't just download Wordpress, wear a yuppie shirt and call yourself a genius back then, you had to write your own scripts/software, or do it by hand with HTML and a whole lot of patience.
I know I was doing it, with a randy assortment of little management apps and batch files (I was a DOS geek at the time). My design skills were puke, but it's safe to say my site was updated extremely often for a vanity site; more than my present blog, that's for sure. This was in 1996, the good old days when the biggest MP3 stash online was bongo.tamu.edu and animated gifs were all the rage.
Did I make any money with that early "blog" ? Hell no! Does that disqualify me as a blogger ? To the WSJ, probably!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I've been posting my mindless and uninformed opinions on BBS's for way more then 10 years =)
John Carmack used finger to blog way back when. Before that, we used news to do stuff like what Twitter does today.
I kept an online diary older than this "date". Was it called a blog? No, it was collected ramblings, pretty much the same as today. Was it a blog? I have not really changed since I started writing my occasional entries in ~ 95 or so, so yes, it's blogging.
Andrew
Andrew van der Stock
Boinking is (almost) as old as life itself...
here, though a little bit before archive.org found it as shown in the link. Unfortunately, a domain scammer went in and grabbed it just as it expired and I lost my first domain name.
I mean, like, totally! That Schneier guy, what is up with him? Really! Did you read his post on correspondent inference theory? Like, I was totally cool with him when he was all "security through obscurity does not work". But now he's basically giving a recipe for how to be an effective terrorist. If I see that bitch at the mall, me and my homies are gonna have to give him a what's-what, ya hear?
..earlier. Have written to the WSJ to ensure they get to know this as I can prove it.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.