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The Birth of the Blog

CNet has a great story today on the 10th anniversary of blogging:

Someone, somewhere created the very first Web log. It’s just not quite clear who.

It may not be one of the Internet’s grandest accomplishments, but with the number of active bloggers hovering somewhere around 100 million, according to one estimate, there are some serious bragging rights to be claimed by the first person who provably laid fingers to keyboard in the traditional bloggy way.

Was the first blogger the irascible Dave Winer? The iconoclastic Jorn Barger? Or was the first blogger really Justin Hall, a Web diarist and online gaming expert whom The New York Times Magazine once called the “founding father of personal blogging”?

Read the whole thing.

This reminds me of similar discussions / arguments in the snowboard and wakeboard industries. Which I bet most industries end up having at one time or another.

To me questions/ arguments about who created the first blog is a sure sign that blogging and new media is emerging from the early adopter phase to entering the mainstream.

More at Bloggers Blog:

There were also a lot of lesser known people keeping web journals and online diaries back in the mid 90s before anyone called it a blogging.

Hip Mojo has a great timeline.

Sometime in 1971
Stanford’s Les Earnest creates the “finger” protocol.

December 1977
The finger protocol becomes an official standard.

January 1994
Swarthmore student Justin Hall begins compiling lists of links at his site, links.net, and continues adding to the site for 11 years.

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  1. no imageJim Durbin (Check me out!) said on April 8th, 2007 at 3:38 pm

    I always thought this discussion a bit silly, and never take people who claim to be the first blogger seriously.

    If all it takes to qualify as a blogger is to publish information online of a personal nature, than blogging has to be traced back to the very first computers.

    But that’s not what blogging is - blogging, shall we say, emerged…which means you can’t be a blogger before the phenomenon of blogging came into being.

    It’s like saying that the Chinese has ballistic missles because they had arrows with fireworks and gunpowder on them. While interesting, there is quite a differnence between ICBM’s and 1200 AD fireworks.

    Call them protobloggers if you will, just as we call manlike bipeds before homo sapiens humanoids. They are close, but they aren’t modern humans as we understand them. Using this framework, it gets real heard to talk about blogs and bloggers before 1999 and the emergence of Pyra Labs.

    Prior to that - it’s no longer relevant, and more an attempt to gain street cred. If “bloggers” were around in the early 90’s, then they failed miserably in bringing their product to the masses.

    I always say - it’s not the blogger that matters, it’s the blogosphere that matters. “Bloggers” had no impact before the blogosphere. Let’s study this by all means, but let’s not get caught up in games of who was first.

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