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.

Not quite the first

[nemerrle]

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]

Oblig maddox

[ascendant]

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

mmm not really

[azav]

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.

[vitaflo]

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.

History of blogging

[btempleton]

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.

Credit where it's due.

[counterfriction]

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