The Wall Street Journal has proclaimed that the blog is now 10 years old, and they’ve picked on twelve people to divulge what blogs mean to them.
I’m not convinced that Jorn Barger was quite so revolutionary as to have created the first blog in 1997, as I was reading reverse-chronological web pages way before then – as far back as 1994. Nevertheless, it’s the likes of Barger, Dave Winer, and Cameron Barrett that have been crowned as the first real bloggers, according to WSJ.
The WSJ does a fair job of waxing lyrical about the decade-long history of blogging, and as readers of the Blog Herald, I’m sure you don’t need it all repeating here.
Duncan provided us with a short history of blogging, suggesting that blogs were definitely around in 1995. Social Computing goes much further, asking whether blogging first started in 1997, 1994, or 1983?
Regardless of the exact dates and technologies involved, this shows that the concepts behind blogging are nothing new at all – sharing news, interesting facts, or trivia, each day, is hardly an invention of the 90s. What has changed is how easy it is now for anyone to set up and maintain a blog.
Of greater interest to me is how blogging has evolved to a point where it’s being positively reported by such an institution as the Wall Street Journal. Though many have cried that the facts aren’t wholly accurate, at least blogging is now in the mainstream psyche.
