Re:lol etc. (Score 1)

At the end of the year 2000, Noah Grey created the free and open-source blogging software Greymatter (now maintained by a community of users). Wil Wheaton's new book describes it as "the original, primordial blogging platform. Blogs look like they do... because Noah Grey did it first."

I got news for you, some of us were blogging way before this software was invented. The original, primordial blogging platform was static pages, just files being shared by a server with no interpretation. The reason Greymatter (which I have literally never heard of before now, despite having had a webpage with dynamic content since the mid-nineties) looks the way it does is because it was copying the style of the blogs which existed before it. And those blogs, including mine, were influenced by the state of web browser development. Once tables became a thing, sidebars became popular, and defined the look of webpages in general.

I'm not against people helping people with their medical bills, though it's pathetic that this is still necessary on the richest nation on the planet. I have nothing against the author of this software, and wish him the best. But the whole idea that the blogosphere was defined by this little-known software is revisionist nonsense.

It's really not 'revisionist nonsense' because you weren't a part of the community at the time. Greymatter created a community around its users that was much different than just ftp-ing your static files, which I also did prior to its release. Also just because you haven't heard of something, it doesn't make it little-known. It inspired WordPress. Everything / Nothing sites were super popular with teenagers in the early 2000s and the knowledge sharing around blog layouts and integration w/ greymatter and things like tagboard were huge.