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.

Wow amazing coincidence

10 is also the mental age of people who blog.

Slashbot Rhyme

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.

Credit where it's due.

Come on man, give credit where it's due. Eberlin [slashdot.org] flowed that originally in this thread [slashdot.org]

Re:

Sure off topic, but the lack of hot grits and natalie portman was upsetting, i say mod down to +4 Funny. ;)

Re:

By most definitions, Slashdot is a blog. I would say their ode to /. could be considered very on topic.

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How old is /. anyway? I have the feeling I've been here for far more than 10 years.

Re:Wow amazing coincidence

Depends on the kind of blog. A personal feelings blog, akin to most Live Journals/My Space/etc? I agree. Technical blogs, e.g., programming techniques/tips? Those are better, but aren't really blogs. They just allow someone to easily post information without organizing it into website.

Re:

What about news blogs? Porn blogs? Slashdot? Economics blogs? Philosophy blogs? Blogs intended to keep your friends up to date on your life? There are lots of blogs that serve different purposes to different audiences.

Oblig maddox

If these words were people, I would embrace their genocide [xmission.com]

I thought it was Dave Winer that invented it

I mean, the guy claims to have invented everything else, right?

Re:

Those who can blog, blog. Those who can't post to Slashdot.

Oh, please, it's much older than 10 years

We all know Dr. Doogie Howser, MD, invented blogging back in 1989.

Sounds like the making of a Futurama joke

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)

He also typical of most bloggers:

"Maintained by Jorn Barger ([e-mail]). Last updated: Aug99"

Re:

That does seem to the way of most Blogs. If only this thought [blaugh.com] would occur to a few more wannabe bloggers, then there might be a higher signal to noise ratio out there.

Overinflated self-importance, however...

... much more than 10 years old.

Re:

Yup. First thing that could be likened to a blog was the usenet group mod.ber, which was a guy's one-man newsgroup which he used as a blog. That was like, mid '80s.

Sounds about right

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.

Re:

So the first blog was really this?:

April 4 - My son barfed on the curtains :-(

April 7 - My son said "daddy" for the first time :-)

May 2 - My wife forced me to change Billy's diapers. Ohhh, they stunk to high hell :-(

May 4 - Little Billy uttered a bunch of

Not quite the first

Umm, Steve Jackson (of GURPS fame) has had a daily blog since December 1994: http://www.sjgames.com/ill/1994/ill-dec94.html [sjgames.com]

Mod parent up!

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.

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Bah. Dogs invented blogging long before there were even computers. They call it "pissing on trees".

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"blog" is short for "web log" A regularly updated .plan file is not a "web log". Therefore . . .

Suck.com

Suck.com was publishing almost-daily since 1995.

http://www.suck.com/daily/archive/1995.html [suck.com]

It's important to note blogs != online diaries

at least according to their definition.

Online diaries [wikipedia.org] are several years older.

mmm not really

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.

They're certainly older than that.

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.

not to brag but i've been "blogging" for eleven

Seriously, check it out: July 31st, 1996: http://asecular.com/musings/aug96 [asecular.com]. and the day before yesterday: http://asecular.com/index.php?070713 [asecular.com]

shit moves around

it used to be here http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://spies.com/~gu s /musings/aug96.htm [archive.org] and before that it was here http://atlas.comet.net/~gus/musings/aug96.htm [comet.net] which might predate the wayback machine

Eight more years

And it will be legal.

History of blogging

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.

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 .plan file under finger might have a claim on being an earlier blog.

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 [wikipedia.org] and I wrote about RHF's history as the oldest blog [netfunny.com] with pointers to other contenders.

Re:

Brad Templeton's contributions as outlined here are now part of an article in Social Computing Magazine, "Did Blogging First Start in 1997, 1994...or 1983?" [socialcomp...gazine.com]. Thanks to Brad and to Slashdot for setting the record straight!

Pitty he did not patent it

because that would have ment that nobody would be able to blog.

How quickly the WELL has been forgotten.

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.

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not just WELL, but also here in the UK at least) text talkers/BBS such as CheesePlants House (1990), Olajier (1991) and of course most ended up on Monochrome BBS [mono.org] which is still running today and has active user accounts that are over 16 years old. The lat

I _stopped_ blogging in 2001

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 inter

what's new?

Well before the sites mentioned in the WSJ article, the folks at UIUC NCSA [uiuc.edu] (who begat Mosaic, from which sprung Netscape, Mozilla, and Firefox), had a What's New [netscape.com] site that did what indexed the best of the web (which the article describes as the orignin o

Daily Illuminator

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 [sjgames.com]. That has this guy beat by 2 years at least.

I was "blogging" before that...

... 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

Umm... Lileks?

The article states:

On Dec. 23, 1997, on his site, Robot Wisdom, Mr. Barger wrote: "I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis," and the Oxford English Dictionary regards this as the primordial root of the wo

Justin Hall cited by some sources

FWIW, Duncan Riley [duncanriley.com] 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

Re:

Ric Ford was blogging in early 1994 at Macintouch.com and he's still at it today.

Blog: definition

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.

BBS?

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 ARPA

I call bullshit!

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 cal

Blogging is way older... just different names

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

Re:Unintentional DDoS

Nothing says, "Thanks for inventing blogging!" like taking down your server

If they did invent blogging, that's certainly how I'd repay them.

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If you check the Firehose you can find all the articles you could ever want to get your grubby little hands on.

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You know, I agree! I actually blogged about this very phenomenon just the other day. Here's a link to my blog! [hahagreatidea.com] I'm sure you'll be very interested in what I had to say.

(disclaimer: above link does not contain content relevant to this post... or does it?)

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Slashdot is the quintessential blog, and slightly older than 10 years.

How much I don't know, I only started reading it 10 years ago.