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.

Re:Wow amazing coincidence

[daeg]

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.

Sounds about right

[zaren]

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.

It's important to note blogs != online diaries

[artifex2004]

at least according to their definition.

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

Re:Overinflated self-importance, however...

[ByteGuerrilla]

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.