Blog history

The Guardian's Newsblog has a nice retrospective on the history of blogs. Lots of folks have been linking to Dave Winer's blog, Scripting News, as he celebrated the 10th anniversary of the launch of his blog on April 1.

Winer's may have been the first major blog that's still around; another that has been given that credit is Jorn Barger's Robot Wisdom, although his oldest archived page shows a December 1997 start. It was definitely Barger who coined the term 'Web log'. Robot Wisdom has gone in and out of use. Currently Barger hasn't updated it in a few months, but is posting to a 'Robot Wisdom Auxiliary', poetry-centric with occasional link dumps.

Winer credits the CERN What's New? page as the oldest blog (it certainly was the world's first Web site). I certainly remember linking to a few more What's New? pages when I started keeping my own What's New? page on a news room Intranet, in 1996. Netscape had a good one, and there were a few others.

The Guardian's list is a great reference resource, though, for all of us who will continue to look at blogging as a phenomenon. It's a great compilation of the high-and low-lights, from Trent Lott to Instapundit to Washingtonienne to Cathy Sierra.

(A postscript: here's what appeared at the bottom of that first-archived Robot Wisdom page:

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: The Robot Wisdom Pages include far more text than anyone could be expected to read online, so within the next few months we hope to offer most of it in a $20 hardcopy edition--

I guess we've all made time to read online now.)