Happy birthday to blogging
Posted July 16th, 2007 in Meta
Just a little bit of navel gazing in this post, the blogosphere is apparently a decade old according to this mixed piece in the WSJ.
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. On Dec. 23, 1997, on his site, Robot Wisdom, Mr. Barger wrote: “I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis,” and the Oxford English Dictionary regards this as the primordial root of the word “weblog.”
I’ve been doing this for four of those ten. Ultimately though I don’t give a toss about what the mainstream media thinks about blogging and bloggers because they usually get it all wrong. I’m especially not interested in the opinions of clapped out ice cream suited authors and pin striped newspaper editors who spend their days avoiding their former brief of speaking truth to power and telling lies to further the profits of their media mogul masters.
Blogging is an evolving media and it is whatever you’d like it to be, nothing more, nothing less. Any attempts to find a box to place it in will always be futile. A blog is only as good or useful as the person driving it, and while they will be around for some time yet I’m happy to predict their death because they are already being replaced by smaller, quicker more mobile applications.
Anyway, happy birthday to the blog. The blog is dead, long live the blog.
More from Mark over at Larvatus Prodeo and Scott Rosenberg of Salon.
technorati tags: blogging
What others have to say…
Heh! You old timer you. I wonder how far you can take the ‘licious franchise Fritz. We’ll see in ten years huh?
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Lessee if I can get the chronology right. It would have been 2000 or 2001 when I started hunting and gathering links to items that tickled my fancy, to which I appended some of my own commentary. Actually I had a perl script to the hunting for me. I ran an agricultural news service that you could subscribe to and put the content on your web page dynamically through various means. The perl script ran every night and crawled for press releases and research results from sources of agricultural news like ag schools, government research centers, and the big ag companies like Monsanto and ADM. It was kind of like Cyclelicious except for agriculture news, so I guess you might call it Agrilicious?