Comments on: World’s First Blogger? How Dumb.

By: SmugBlog: Don MacAskill » Blog Archive » The Wall Street Journal is wrong.

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 03:29:25 +0000

[...] Sorry, I love the WSJ, but it’s true. They claim blogging just turned 10. I’ve written about this before, but here’s the short version: [...]

By: John

John — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 14:36:22 +0000

Well - let’s be clear - in 1968 IBM mainframe’s had a system that was used for project communication and it was simply a Blog of ideas - Blog that…

By: andy

andy — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 19:02:05 +0000

That’s absolutely right. Nobody called them “blogs,” but the first thing most people did when they first used that “FREE 10 HOURS!” AOL diskette was to make a little page updating people on what they’ve been up to. There was no WordPress, no Movabletype, no Blogspot, but we certainly had our Hotdog editor and Netscape Navigator 3 Gold, with built-in HTML editor.

Those were the first blogs.

By: Pete Barr-Watson

Pete Barr-Watson — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 18:14:50 +0000

Gavin: I think it was about Justin Hall - http://www.links.net/ - I’ve always thought that Justin was ahead of most people with the idea of ‘blogging’.

By: Gavin

Gavin — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 18:10:17 +0000

I remember a one page Wired article from the early 90’s where they featured some kid who had a site and posted all sorts of mundane aspects of his life and was very open about all sorts of strange private things. I wish I could remember what issue it was, but I can’t. I tried looking through the archive but I don’t think they include short bits like that.

Anyway, yeah…the term Blog isn’t as old as the actual practice which predates it by many years.

By: onethumb

onethumb — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 06:59:32 +0000

I was a hard-core BBSer back in the day. Technically BBSes (and BIX/CompuServe/GEnie/Prodigy) weren’t weblogs, but you’re right, the concept is the same.

Things just evolved naturally.

By: cabbey

cabbey — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 05:31:29 +0000

Where’s that quote from Santayana when we need it?

Am I the only one that remembers the BBS systems in the early/mid 80s? Were the two I used that had journals the only ones in the world that did? (I doubt it). Yeah, we didn’t call it “blogging” but SO WHAT, it was the same concept.

By: rick

rick — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 04:08:36 +0000

Dave Winer credits Tim Berners-Lee with blog: http://www.userland.com/theHistoryOfWeblogs.

By: chris

chris — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 02:41:39 +0000

Don, I’ve long maintained that Ric Ford’s MacInTouch is the original Mac blog, only we never knew to call it a blog back in the mid-’90s. I’m not sure when Ric took the site live, but it’s around the mid-decade mark, so he’s certainly up there with you as a pre-blog blogger.