I’m just an observer in this particular battle, but it appears that the WSJ sort of flubbed it today with a hastily written article on the history of blogging. Duncan Riley writes a response and points to his earlier post saying that blogging began much earlier. He also notes that wikipedia disagrees with the WSJ.
Obviously someone is wrong here, and I suspect its the journal. Credit needs to be given where it’s due.
Interesting to see Marc Andreessen point to his “What’s New” page from 1993 as an early blog: http://wp.netscape.com/home/whatsnew/whats_new_0693.html
Looks very much like some contemporary blogs, minus permalinks.
Yep, wrong. Way wrong. I’ve been blogging since 1995 and I wasn’t the first – I was a copycat.
More here: http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/07/15/the-wall-street-journal-is-wrong/
I wrote a history of blogging for a school project during my last semester. It’s located at: http://seanmcb.com/projects/bhob/ It’s aimed at a slightly less tech-savvy audience than this blog.
Not sure if it’s 100% accurate since I wasn’t “there” for it all, but I used the sources I had. I DO love blogging though, so it fits your criteria.
One thing I find myself often having to remind people of is that there were 100′s of people who were blogging/keeping online journals YEARS before Dave Winer.
For example, my college friend, Mary Anne Mohanraj has been keeping THE SAME online journal since Dec 1995 at http://mamohanraj.com/journal
And yes, though she started it by being hand edited HTML, she has had comments for quite a long time.
A more fundamental point is that there is a vast and very active and important non-tech/non-political blogosphere, one which does not get written about in the histories of blogging, one which rarely gets as much attention – but which has been active and vital in many people’s lives for now well over 12 years – not the “10 years” which seems to be the number other people are citing.
Shannon
(and I remember watching Mary Anne as she first started editing her Journal – she was by no means the first people to do so, at the time there were already 100′s of other online journals)
All this comes down to semantics, and it’s *impossible* to get a single answer. Why? Because to many (myself included) “blogging” is a cultural thing.. it’s not just writing items in a certain order on the Web.. it’s keeping a blogroll, talking to other bloggers, posting to del.icio.us, stuff like that. And there’s no way you can pin down who was the “first” since different people have been doing different combinations of blogging activities over time.
It’s like if you wanted to define when “Web 2.0″ began. Was it when the definition was made? Or was it when eBay allowed people to post and share stuff on a single site? You shouldn’t define definite start and end times on these things.. we should be talking about eras, not dates.
What’s most ironic about the Journal’s article is that “the first” blogger – or certainly one of the first – now works for it. John P – who writes Digital Daily for the WSJ’s All Things Digital site (http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/) – used to write Good Morning Silicon Valley for The Mercury News. He started writing it in the mid-late 90′s, I think.
Online users were “blogging” (although their individual collections of regular posts were usually called “electronic journals”) as early as 1982 via PARTIcipate on the Source (POTS). So whoever you dig up to write that history of blogging had better go all the way back, or the result will seem equally inaccurate to the many of us who remember the online communities and user publications of the early ’80s.
“Blogging” really began only 6 or so years ago when the term was coined. Before that it was just “writing” or “journaling” (that’s why it’s called liveJOURNAL and not liveBLOG) and was going on years before these dolts care to conceive. The person coined at “first” blogging just wants their ill-gotten 15 minutes of digital fame that will probably be forgotten tomorrow.
Together with to other authors I wrote a book about Social Software (it’s in German – sorry), which contains a chapter about blogs. That’s what we found out:
Justin Hall was the first blogger with his “Justin’s Links from the Underground” (www.links.net – not active anymore). He started his link blog in 1994.
The word “weblog” was first used by Jorn Bargers in 1997 on his website “Robot Wisdom” (www.robotwisdom.com).
Peter Merholz was the first to use “we blog” as the headline for his blog peterme.com (www.peterme.com) in 1999.
Also in 1999 Evan Williams from Pyra Labs founded http://www.blogger.com and started the first software project for bloggers.
I agree with this guy: If so many bloggers didn’t come off like Comic Book Guy (yeah, I’m referring to several of you here), blogging would be much more successful.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070720.wweb20rvt/BNStory/Technology/home
Mike,
I’ve never read crunchnotes before. Cool.
So.. there is someone now writing a book on the history of blogging. I can’t say whom yet, but you know him, and he’s good, and will likely do a great job.
Also, regarding who coined blog, that was Peter Merholtz or Peterme.
mary
As I recall, there were things like blogs before there were blogs. People had websites on which they regularly posted new entries with links to new things on the Internet back in 1993. Even before that, there were things like blogs dating back to pre-historic times. Add an RSS feed to caveman drawings and you have Flickr. In 1994, the Drudge Report started as an email newsletter and later became a website that looked exactly like it still does. It was like a blog as it, well, had links to stories appearing on newspaper websites and a long list of links that is sort of what we’d now call a blogroll. Matt Drudge has steadfastly refused to call the Drudge Report a blog, and, frankly, he shouldn’t, because it’s not. In the history of the beginning of blogging, this makes Matt Drudge unique, as everyone else who was doing anything like a blog in the middle 1990s, today wants to say it was the first weblog. Matt Drudge, who could lay claim to the title of first blogger with some fairly convincing arguments — at least better than others — is still insulted when his site is referred to as such.
Scott Rosenberg from Salon just took a stab at a book on the history of blogging: Say Everything: http://www.sayeverything.com/