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Ten years of blogging, or not (and ye olde Web)
- IT TOPICS:Desktop Applications, Internet, Personal Technology
It's Monday's IT Blogwatch: in which the Wall Street Journal tries to rewrite history. Not to mention the Web as we remember it...
The WSJ's Tunku Varadarajan waxes lyrical:
We are approaching a decade since the first blogger -- regarded by many to be Jorn Barger -- began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary ... The dating of the 10th anniversary of blogs, and the ascription of primacy to the first blogger, are imperfect exercises. Others, such as David Winer, who blogged with Scripting News, and Cameron Barrett, who started CamWorld, were alongside the polemical Mr. Barger in the advance guard. And before them there were "proto-blogs," embryonic indications of the online profusion that was to follow. But by widespread consensus, 1997 is a reasonable point at which to mark the emergence of the blog as a distinct life-form.
...
In the decade since their conception, blogs, once a smorgasbord of links, have evolved into vehicles for a fuller, more forceful and opinionated prose ... The other change in the blog has, of course, been its mainstreaming. Blogging was once the province of the Nerd Without a Life ... Today, while members of that tribe still abound, there are others who blog not because it is their only window on the world, but because blogging offers the opportunity of direct and immediate communion with those who would respond to their ideas. [read more]
Om Malik is surprised:
Who knew? ... Wow, it took a mainstream pub, The Wall Street Journal to remind us that it is the 10th year of blogging. They have a special feature running in the paper, today which talks about most of the pioneers of blogging, including Dave Winer. WSJ calls Jorn Barger, Winer and Cameron Barrett as the advance guard of blogging.
...
The article talks to 12 important people, and what blogging means for them, and the general media landscape. Never mind the heavy political skew of the story, it is still a worthy read.Mia Farrow loves BoingBoing. Dick Costolo (now a Google slave) is a Fake Steve Jobs groupie, while the other guy from Craigslist aka not Craig Newmark loves Valleywag. Geriatric hipster Tom Wolfe “weary of narcissistic shrieks and baseless ‘information,’ no longer reads blogs.” Just like his books. [read more]
Doug Aamoth sings:
Happy birthday to you, you escaped from a zoo, you look like a monkey, and you smell like one too — HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BLOGGING! Although difficult to pinpoint the exact moment in time that blogging’s Big Bang occured, it is widely believed to have happened about ten years ago with Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom website. I’m not exactly sure how the Wall Street Journal figures that a site born on December 17, 1997 has been around for ten years as of July of 2007 but, hey, it’s a very large news organization and you should trust everything you read no matter where it comes from, right? Actually, I should point out that WSJ says that providing a specific date is too difficult and that we should recognize the year 1997 as when blogging began. So there you have it.Regardless of the exact date, take a moment to think back to what you were doing in the latter half of 1997. I was a naive, impressionable nobody from the Midwest getting ready to ship off to the University of Puget Sound where I’d spend the first three months of school drinking Jack Daniel’s Sour Mash whiskey mixed with Cherry Kool-Aid. Look at me now! I’m a jaded, stubborn nobody from the Midwest who’s ass-deep in the fast-paced world of blogging and drinks alcohol as it’s supposed to be mixed — often without Kool-Aid. My, how times have sort of changed. [read more]
And Jason Kaneshiro ponders thuswise:
The first thing I am struck by are the wide variety of people and purposes - the different ways people are using this media generically called “blogging.” We have journalist blogs, corporate blogs, aspiring writers, political pundits, comedians, satire, bands promoting their music, personal diaries, financial blogs, cooking blogs, soldier blogs, web design, tutorials, bird watching, travel blogs, and blogging for money. I’m sure I’ve left a ton out.
Much as people define themselves by the newspapers, magazines, and television shows they watch, there are any number of blogs out there for almost any interest. So we learn that Mia Farrow reads BoingBoing and Newt Gingrich likes RedState.com.
I think the best part about this article is I now have a short list of blogs I haven’t heard of before and should check out. [read more]
But Duncan Riley ain't impressed:
According to my history of blogging (still No. 3 on Google BTW, and heavily researched at the time) blogging turned 11 on January 10, the date in which the first credited blogger (according to Wikipedia as well) Justin Hall commences writing an online journal with dated daily entries, although each daily post is linked through an index page. On the journal he writes “Some days, before I go to bed, I think about my day, and how it meshed with my life, and I write a little about what learned me.” In February Dave Winer follows up with a weblog that chronicles the 24 Hours of Democracy Project.Winer has often claimed that he was the first blogger, I’ve long disagreed but whether it was Hall or Winer is a moot point: both were blogging in 1996, and yet Varadarajan writes this rubbish ... I’ve never read ANYONE claiming that Jorn Barger was the first blogger; even Rebecca Blood’s insular and cliquey history of blogging (written in 2000) which has been at the top of Google for pretty much ever, refers to Berger as coining the term, not creating blogging.
So Tunku Varadarajan: if Barger is “regarded by many” to be the first blogger, name your sources! [read more]
Michael Arrington agrees:
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 ... Obviously someone is wrong here, and I suspect its the journal. Credit needs to be given where it’s due. [read more]
Robert Scoble, too:
Dave Winer had a blog long before Jorn Barger started blogging or came up with the name “blog.” In fact, if I remember my history right Jorn was using software developed by Dave Winer to do his blog. Dave Winer was certainly at the center of the kind of blogging I was involved in. It’s sad that so many journalists get the history wrong. It’s also amazing that very few (I don’t see evidence that ANY were interviewed, actually) of the pre-2001 bloggers were interviewed for this article.
I thought mainstream journalists were supposed to get it right and leave the inaccuracies and all that to us bloggers… [read more]
Donna Bogatin giggles:
“Name your sources,” Riley calls out to WSJ writer Tunku Varadarajan ... At the same time, however, Riley is proudly serving up Google AdSense pitches hawking WSJ subscriptions to his readers, directly under his masthead: “duncanriley.com, blogging is not a spectator sport.”YES, and that is why the old media notions that a “Chinese wall” can exist between editorial and advertising are irrelevant in a Google AdSense fueled blogosphere.
Why not? 1) Google AdSense is considered by readers same as other blog content, just ask Google and 2) every single word and image in an individual’s namesake blog carries with it an implicit endorsement by the blog’s author, just ask readers. [read more]
Can't you just hear Brad Linder say, "Huh?":
I disagree with Bogatin that readers will think this is an implicit endorsement of the WSJ. I think you'd have to be a few chips short of a cookie to think that Riley actually wants you to subscribe to the newspaper. And I think that most savvy readers are well aware that "Ads by Google" means... ads by Google. But this incident does show a flaw in contextual advertising. If you write about the Wall Street Journal and use its title as many times as I have in this post, odds are Google's going to serve up a few ads, whether you've been bashing the paper or praising it.On the one hand, this just goes to show that contextual advertising does help keep a firewall between advertising and editorial content. You can pick your nose, but you can't pick the ads that will show up on your site. On the other hand, readers may rightly think that some authors write about topics specifically to attract high-paying ads related to those topics. So in a way, the advertising is clearly affecting the way some people write. Fortunately, it's usually pretty easy to spot and avoid web sites that are designed more with Google in mind than readers. [read more]
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Previously in IT Blogwatch
And finally... Browse like it's 1994
Richi Jennings is an independent technology and marketing consultant, specializing in email, blogging, Linux, and computer security. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. Contact Richi at blogwatch@richi.co.uk.
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