Justin Hall has blogged since before they called it blogging, since 1994. Rob Wittig’s review of Justin’s Links.net is a wonderful introduction to Justin’s site and to the stretched out over years experience of reading blogs as well. According to Justin’s entry on Blogtree.com, he was inspired by Moonmilk, started in November 1993, and is still going. Not quite like modern blogs, but definitely short dated posts in reverse chronlogical order. Since there was no web until 1993 there can’t be many older bloggish sites than Moonmilk.
I'm Jill Walker Rettberg, author and professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. I co-direct the Center for Digital Narrative, a 10-year Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence, and I lead the ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life. This site started as my blog in October 2000.
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?