Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

cherrise — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 13:12:44 -0000

this seems to be a heavy situation. I think if you aren't the founder or the one who started blogs then you wouldn't know the history. However i think you have a battle on your hands but if you feel this way its ok to argue your case because I do it all the time, but its hard for me because people don't understand me. last but not least argue for what you believe in.

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

charlesgeorgetaylor — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 22:31:05 -0000

The wall street journal just published a link to my blog. Is that a good or a bad thing?

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

Jorn Barger — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 11:13:48 -0000

My reply: http://robotwisdom2.blogspo...

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

Hugh Toppe — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 20:08:07 -0000

For me, the first blog that was remained in my consciousness was Magdalena Donea's online journal, which I believe dates back to 1994.

There was a chronology, there were tidbit insights and personal revelations, all fleshed out with quotidian detail (e.g., "I am listening to...").

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

steve — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 16:56:35 -0000

@31 Aahh yes, "Hwy 17 Page of Shame", one of my early favorites.

Everyone knows that Justin Hall started the modern blog and Jorn Barber coined the phase blog. We know it's true because Wikipedia says so ;-)

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

fpaynter — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 15:43:22 -0000

http://www.thebishop.net/geodog/archives/images/I-invented-it.gif

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

Motormouth — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 15:00:01 -0000

I started writing my thoughts/events online in March, 1995, which just might make me the first woman.

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

Rob La Gesse — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 14:25:47 -0000

This pretty much settles the argument:
http://www.forgetfoo.com/im...

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

officedoodles — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 13:13:57 -0000

I think if you wanted to take it back even further what about Journaling?

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

LayZ — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 13:00:54 -0000

@25 "What about the ancient Sumerians? They were making weblogs well before anyone else. Hammurabi was the first blogger."

C'mon! You know as well as I do that according to Scoble and Winer, communication didn't exist before the invention of the internet.

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

Joe Pinegar — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 12:41:37 -0000

Which brings us back around to the point. Blogs weren't a new idea, just a new way of organizing, presenting, and (with RSS) distributing stuff that had been going on for a number of years.

For my two cents, anyone remember Robert Sideman's Online Insider?

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

Dan Guy — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 12:35:09 -0000

At least your caveating it as "the kind of blogging I was involved in". Too often you (and others) mistake your limited circle of friends for the web as a whole. There are entire enclaves of people who were blogging before Winer and who have never heard of either of you.

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

BL — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 12:07:13 -0000

What about the ancient Sumerians? They were making weblogs well before anyone else. Hammurabi was the first blogger.

This is silly. Jorn Barger gets credit because he coined the term weblog and his was about the links, not some kind of update page.

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

LayZ — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 12:00:11 -0000

"If I remember my history right Jorn was using software developed by Dave Winer to do his blog."

Winer is now taking credit for developing plain text and HTML? Wow!

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

mikeelliott1 — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 11:45:20 -0000

The BBS's from 25 years ago were blogs long before anyone gave them a name.

http://mikeelliottsblog.wordpress.com

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

Salubri — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 11:36:11 -0000

According to Dave Winer (here http://oldweblogscomblog.sc... "The first weblog was the first website, http://info.cern.ch/", I would have to agree (to an extent) that this is the first weblog. I kept a "weblog" for a very short time back in the early 90's and hosted it on my PC so people I knew online could see what sites I had found and liked. The entries were chronological and displayed in reverse-chrono order. Now - my weblog was basic HTML and was stored locally on my machine (so only available when I was online) This is not "blogging" as we currently know it however (unfortunately *grin*). Justin Hall is definitely the first "blogger" (IMHO).

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

Jeff — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 11:33:20 -0000

Who cares? Seriously... the constant mutual masturbatory practices of that entire circle of people makes me sick. I did online picture sharing and journaling in 1997. What do I win?

These guys may have created a name for it, but give them credit for the name, not for inventing something countless others were already doing.

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

kevin — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 11:28:42 -0000

Blog is a new word for an ancient concept, and even an old concept on the Internet and later the Web, though I suppose, by definition, "blog" pertains only to the web so maybe instances that predate Mosaic are DQ'd.

That said, my favorite proto-blog is the Hwy 17 Page of Shame, from 1995-96. 2 guys documenting their daily commute over the hill with an Apple QuickTake camera.

http://web.archive.org/web/...

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

Jorn Barger — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 11:09:58 -0000

I did use Userland Frontier, but I had to rewrite the macros in the 'newspage suite' to fit my own style, so I wasn't just imitating Dave's definitions. Dave has never followed strict reverse order, he's always featured Userland-related news items at the top of each daily entry. I abstracted the 'logging links' function, emphasizing the importance of keeping the newest links always at the very top, and that's what the term should really mean. 99% of people who use the term 'blog' have no idea that logging links is what it's really about.

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

Megan — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 11:03:39 -0000

I went to college with Justin Hall at Swarthmore and he used to recruit students who were studying on the lawn --like a rabid leader of a political party-- to go take his free workshops in the computer science department, and learn what the web was "the beginning of real democracy..." He was a complete nut, but a passionate nut; only, you didn't want to get too close to him for fear that details of the most personal nature would appear the next hour on his site. Doug Block directed a HBO documentary about him -which now seems ridiculously dated- called Home Page.

For me one of the most startling things about Justin's work was the intimate point of view and how he wrote and photographed (and eventually video taped) his daily life. The "reverse chronological order/dated posts" attribute is important, but I think that personal "point of view" aspect is critical to the definition of a blog: while it's expanded in scope, most are still opinion journalism, and independent viewpoints --not a directory of press releases or corporate-controlled information.

People may argue with me on this, but if independence wasn't part of the expectation of blogs, then no one should have a problem with the pay-per-post guys, the people ready microsoft campaign that FM got involved with...or the censorship rant about creative cow's post-deletion. If it was just dated posts, more sites/services would apply and the issues of transparency, sources and viewpoints would be less controversial.

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

Chris — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 10:48:07 -0000

I remember messages on the public city bulletin boards that you would call with a local number on my commodore 64. They were public computer news announcements by the BBS operator, and thus they were blogging.

This was about in 1985 or 86. city dial in bulletin boards always had a news section that was regularly updated. This was in effect the first version of blogs.

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

Mawson — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 10:24:53 -0000

What about Good Morning Silicon Valley? I personally read it for 8 years until Packzowski left for All Things Digital. And I know it's been around for a lot longer than that. If it wasn't one of the first blogs, it was certainly very early. It also may have been the first tech news blog. And it was created by The Mercury News, which shows that some in MSM really do get it and got it long before a lot of other people.

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

Ryan — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 10:07:50 -0000

I remember when I first heard the word "blogging." My reaction was: "we've been doing that for years."

I think the main hype started with wordpress, blogger, blogspot, livejournal, etc. Before that there was newspro (or coranto) but that required some perl hacking to get running.

Before that, blogging required your own domain and hosting, and knowing how to write some perl or PHP.

If you ask me, those days were a lot better. Having to put so much time into it ensured that only those who really truly had something to say blogged. It eliminated a lot of the noise that fill the blogosphere today.

of course this "word hype" happens with everything. It happened with AJAX. AJAX was nothing new, somebody just gave it a clever name and it took off. It's happening now with iPhone applications. They're just websites formatted to fit a small screen.

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

Matt — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 09:19:14 -0000

Trying to pinpoint the start of blogging and who it was started by is kind of pointless if you ask me. It has certainly been around since before the late 90's, and you don't even have to reach back to BBS's or "stretch" the definition of a modern blog for that.

I guess I could see if someone wanted to look around for who has been blogging the longest, but that's entirely different then who was blogging first. You're going to constantly be faced with people saying "Yeah, but [so-and-so] was doing [slight-deviation of whatever you just mentioned] a year or two before that!"

Re: Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

Timothy McClanahan — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 05:37:52 -0000

Well, if it weren't for the 'web' part of (web)log, I'd say that .plan files were basically the same thing, really. How old are those?