Wall Street Journal gets blogging history wrong

Blogging is much older even than Frontier (which I was a user of). Back in the early 1980′s I “blogged” on my Wildcat! BBS (which was based in the Bay Area – Novato – and called BIOS II BBS).

It was an online shared mechanism for mw to write and share thoughts and ideas, and it contained a comment function.

If it wasn’t a “blog” I don’t know what disqualifies it… The only real difference now is that most users don’t “dial-in” to a specific number to get at a specific “blog”.

Rob

Robert, you really need to stop this blogging hype! Sheesh!

Dave Winer certainly isn’t one of my favorite techno-geeks simply because our “politics” clash (and my posts magically disappear). BUT, I give credit where credit is do, and Mr. Winer deserves it.

BR,

Robert

Rob: yeah, I guess it depends how you define blogging. If it’s just text on an electronic page that’s in reverse-chronological view, then blogging started a lot earlier than 10 years ago.

If you needed a content management system to do a blog, well, then, it started with Manila and Blogger and other tools in the late 1990s.

To me blogging really started in the late 1990s, but Dave Winer was among the first, if not the first. To say that Jorn was among the first, though, is just wrong.

The way that blogging is defined today, Justin Hall was clearly the first blogger on the web at http://www.links.net. If your definition of blog is a site that had a syndication feed (and I don’t think you should), it would be someone/something else.

Randy: I’m cool with Justin Hall being the first. But it certainly wasn’t Barger.

Has anyone ever definitively defined a blog? I know there has been many discussions/posts on the topic but have never seen anything that’s agreed upon. It’s kind of like Web-2.0. It’s hard to write history if no one actually knows what’s what.

I thought it was “web log” – that would mean as long as you’re journal is accessible via the net (http, ftp, gopher, etc), it’s a blog.

BTW… I didn’t intend for my first post to sound so harsh. I just meant that my opinion clashes too much with Dave’s. I’m sure he’s a great guy.

Doogie Howser: Original Blogger

As far as I can tell, modern “mainstream journalism” basically consists of reproducing a press release, writing a introduction and conclusion and pressing the “go’ button.

Modern Mainstream Journalism is a disgrace.

Nailed…In this case, the MSM is the WSJ, not known for what you speak, even though they can all be guilty at times.

Nailed – replace “mainstream journalism” with the word “blogging”, and you’ll find that your sentence still holds.

No medium is perfect, and I think it is unfair to characterize all bloggers or all mainstream media writers with one broad brush.

Cheers!
Kirupa

I’ve always credited Justin Hall in 1996 (not 1994 as some sources do) as he beat Dave Winer by a matter of weeks on the first blog as we know blogs to be..ie chronological, dated posts. Dave is the father of the blogging CMS, RSS and a whole pile of other things though…and lol that Barger was using his CMS! proves the WSJ as being even MORE wrong.

Maybe WSJ is just a little shook up what with Rupert Murdoch’s offer and all. OT: Can you imagine Walt Mossberg working for Rupert Murdoch?

Reading though the comments and other blogs & comments, I have started to get a feeling that the definition of blog could soon be Best Links Of Gossips

My friend Doug Palermo began writing a web journal in July of 1995, called the Weekly Whack:

http://www.joehewitt.com/feff/whacks/

I never really considered the Whack to be “the first blog”, but now that I am seeing everybody dating the first blogs as Justin Hall and Dave Winer in 1996 it occurs to me that Doug had them beat by a full six months. What Doug lacked that Justin and Dave had is that he was not a connected insider, just a high school kid in New Jersey. He should really get more credit.

I wrote a little more about this on my blog:

http://www.joehewitt.com/blog/origins_of_blog.php

My friend Doug Palermo began writing a web journal in July of 1995, called the Weekly Whack:

http://www.joehewitt.com/feff/whacks/

I never really considered the Whack to be “the first blog”, but now that I am seeing everybody dating the first blogs as Justin Hall and Dave Winer in 1996 it occurs to me that Doug had them beat by a full six months. What Doug lacked that Justin and Dave had is that he was not a connected insider, just a high school kid in New Jersey. He should really get more credit.

I wrote a little more about this on my blog:

http://www.joehewitt.com/blog/origins_of_blog.php

Don’s right – Justin, Dave, and Jorn may have been the first “blog celebrities” but they certainly weren’t the first bloggers. Whoever was truly the first has been long forgotten.

I had a “blog” in 1995.

At the time Compuserve was threatening to charge for licensing to use the GIF format. This was becoming a controversial issue, and I set up a website to link to the latest happenings on the issue.

The site had a reverse-chronological list on the front pages, with some titles linking to separate pages and others being direct links elsewhere. It was updated several times a day, and I got a bunch of calls from journalists – I was interviewed twice on the subject by British magazines.

Sadly, it wasn’t called a “blog” or a “weblog” and was hand-edited HTML, and it didn’t stay online for long, so I can’t prove it ever existed. But it wasn’t the first page of its kind anyway.

Bloggers too often think they invented the Web, but I’ve had sites online since 1994 (complete with reverse-chronological “what’s new” pages) so I still think of blogs as a relatively recent phenomenon.

Frankly, if I were the first blogger, I wouldn’t take credit for it either – there’s a lot about what blogs have become that I wouldn’t be proud of at all.

Have you forgotten that the Wall Street Journal is known as the Republican Bible. It is filled with fraud(intentional misrepresentation of the truth). Have you forgotten the lies we were told before going to our most recent war. Try reading the editorial page. With its disregard for the truth, are you really amazed that they got blogging history wrong.

Has any one thought to, you know, *email* the journalist involved asking him what his source for that was? You know – before someone’s tarred and feathered in public, it might be an idea to at least ask them a couple of questions?

What about http://www.jerrypournelle.com? I’d reckon that’s been around far longer than anything else, pre-dating the term blog or anything similar.

Cheers
Anthony

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?

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!”

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.