Meme creation

— Nick Denton continues his exercise in meme creation, promoting a false theory of blog history: Pedantic nitpick: she doesn’t even mention their precursors, the Bay Area techie blogs; I feel history being edited here. As we’ve demonstrated here previously, the first and oldest blogs belonged to the people known today as warbloggers: Ken Layne, … Continue reading “Meme creation”

— Nick Denton continues his exercise in meme creation, promoting a false theory of blog history:

Pedantic nitpick: she doesn’t even mention their precursors, the Bay Area techie blogs; I feel history being edited here.

As we’ve demonstrated here previously, the first and oldest blogs belonged to the people known today as warbloggers: Ken Layne, Bill Quick, and myself. The elves didn’t get on the bandwagon until 1999, by which time blogging was already old hat. But it’s a fun troll, clearly one of Denton’s favourites, and it earns him points with the elves.

7 thoughts on “Meme creation”

  1. I can only imagine you’re kidding about this. I did some poking around with the Wayback Machine and found your Web site circa Dec 1996 and Sept 2001. That’s just a personal Web page. Not a weblog. Were you blogging somewhere else?

    Bill Quick: His archives only go back to December 2001. Again, his personal Web site, dating from the Dark Ages of the Web, is not a weblog.

    Ken Layne: At least his archives go back to July 2000. His work at Tabloid.net from mid-1997 resembles a weblog in places, but it’s really an online magazine.

    Compare with Camworld circa June 1997, Scripting News circa April 1997 or Robotwisdom circa December 1997. Not to mention the tens of thousands of people that were writing diaries and journals on their sites before Microsoft even had a Web browser (here and here…there are even older ones if you care to look).

    Weblogs are simple things: short chunks of hypertext arranged chronologically on a Web page. No one invented that. It’s a natural thing to do. Marc Andreesen fashioned Mosaic’s What’s New page like that back in 1993. What arose in early 1997, grew slowly for a couple of years, exploded with the creation and popularization of tools like Blogger, Greymatter, Slash, and EditThisPage, and went supernova on September 11th was the formation of an online culture (or “cultures” rather) of people all using the weblog format to publish their ideas, connect with people, and to communicate with them. Before that, people used email, mailing lists, instant messaging, IRC, Usenet, online message boards, BBSes, ezines, and personal Web pages to do these things. The weblog format became recognized as another tool in the publish/connect/communicate toolkit and a lot of people started using it because it was highly effective at the task.

    Richard, I’m sorry but you, Ken Layne, Bill Quick, or any other of the warbloggers didn’t invent the weblog. You guys are all using the format to great effect now, but you clearly weren’t before a lot of others.

  2. The Wayback Machine only goes back to 1997, but even then you can take the Coalition of Parent Support link off my home page to the weblog I maintained with weekly and sometimes daily updates on COPS, the legislature, and the media. Ken Layne’s tabloid.net was certainly every bit as much a weblog as Scripting News, a product promotion site, is today, if not more.

  3. Incidentally, my personal website goes back to 1994, when I worked on technologies for Internet collaboration at EIT under a DARPA grant. EIT, you may know, is where Andresson worked before joining Jim Clark at Netscape, or Mosaic Techologies as it was orignially called. I built logs, archives, video conferencing systems with archive and retrieval and various other forms of group interaction techologies at EIT, including dynamic, group browsable web pages. We regarded logs as a trivial reporting mechanism, but we used them.

  4. Like I just posted on my, er, Web log, it’s a pointless pissing match to say who did whatever first. But the fact is, a lot of “warbloggers” were posting link-heavy commentary years before the SF blogger kids.

    It’s only worth mentioning because my friend Nick thinks a post-simple-blogging log is different than a plain old FTP-updated page. As many have mentioned, one of the very first Web pages was a Web log: What’s New. Yahoo was a Web log of new links, back in the day.

    So, ignore the format and you’ve got to deal with the various kinds of blogs. InstaPundit has as much to do with megnut.org as CNN has to do with the Mike Douglas Show. Yeah, they share a delivery system, but otherwise are totally different.

    Would you mention the Dick Van Dyke show in an article about the first teevee news anchors? Maybe, but only if you were writing about technology and not content.

    (And my online archives go back to 1995, not 2000. I have used many tools to post that stuff — FTP, Blogger, Moveable Type, etc. — but the byline remains the same.)

  6. Technically, weblogs are older than the web. This is possible because the web is more than HTTP – it’s also FTP and Usenet, and there were plenty of logs on Usenet and FTP before TBL logged-in to his first computer.

    Your claim, Dave, that Scripting News is the longest-running blog is fiction – the COPS log was been running longer, originally at http://www.bennett.com/cops and now at coparents.org.

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