I just signed a petition calling for Norwegian universities to use research expertise on AI when deciding how to implement it, rather than having decisions be made mostly administratively. , If you are a researcher in Norway, please read it and sign it if you agree – and share with anyone else who might be interested. The petition was written by three researchers at UiT: Maria Danielsen (a philosopher who completed her PhD in 2025 on AI and ethics, including discussions of art and working life), Knut Ørke (Norwegian as a second language), and Holger Pötzsch (a professor of media studies with many years of research on digital media, video games, disruption, and working life, among other topics). This is not about preventing researchers from exploring AI methods in their research. It is about not uncritically accepting the hype that everyone must use AI everywhere without critical reflection. It is about not introducing Copilot as the default option in word processors, or training PhD candidates to believe they will fall behind if they do not use AI when writing articles, without proper academic discussion. Changes like these should be knowledge-based and discussed academically, not merely decided administratively, because they alter the epistemological foundations of research. Maria wrote to me a couple of months ago because she had read my opinion piece in Aftenposten in which I called for a strong brake on the use of language models in knowledge work. She was part of a committee tasked with developing UiT’s AI strategy and was concerned because there was so much hype and so few members of the committee with actual expertise in AI. I fully support the petition. There are probably some good uses for AI in research, but the uncritical, hype-driven insistence that we must simply adopt it everywhere is highly risky. There are many researchers in Norway with strong expertise in AI, language, ethics, working life, and culture. We must make use of this expertise. This is also partly about respect for research in the humanities, social sciences, psychology, and law. Introducing AI at universities and university colleges is not merely a technical issue, and perhaps not even primarily a technical one. It concerns much more: philosophy of science, methodological reflection, epistemology, writing, publishing, the working environment, and more. […]
nick
No Web until 1993? The very first Web demo happened in 1990, and by 1992 there were several real Web sites going – according to the official history at the W3C site. There is a link to a Web page that hasn’t been modified since November 1990 there.
Maybe the milestone you’re thinking of is the 1993 release of Mosaic, an important early graphical browser that was instrumental in the success of the Web, but wasn’t the very first such browser.
The first Web page, originally at http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html (and no longer accessible there) is online here. It contained a link to a list of Web sites. This page didn’t have dates associated with entries, but it was updated with a comment each time a new website came on line, so the page actually has a decent claim, I think, to being the first blog.
Jill
Thanks Nick – yes, I was thinking of Mosaic in 1993, when the web became a lot more accessible than it was previously. I wasn’t thinking particularly carefully when I wrote that post, and the previous web history didn’t occur to me, so thanks for pointing it out. I do like having historically knowledgeable people around.
I’m not sure it’s useful to stretch the idea of blogs to include even that first page though. I mean, I do see your point, and obviously there are lots of similarity. Probably that site’s closer to our blogs than to the standard idea of a homepage, you know, not the regularly updated kind but the sort that stay put and don’t change. Hm. I must think about it.
I don’t really want to either operate with a very fixed definition of blogs OR define almost everything as a blog. Must think.
HÂkon Styri
I guess it’s feasible to label a few of the very early web pages, like TBLs early list of web servers and maybe the early what’s new pages at Netscape, as proto-blogs (or maybe proto-linkblogs).
Maybe it’s possible to state something about the blogishness of pre-blogs?