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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.
"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.
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
at least according to their definition.
Online diaries are several years older.
Nothing says, "Thanks for inventing blogging!" like taking down your server
If they did invent blogging, that's certainly how I'd repay them.
Latewire
If these words were people, I would embrace their genocide
Do not attribute to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence.
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.
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.
And it will be legal.
What?
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
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.
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