Wherein Elmer Hunts for the Origin of Weblog
The first occurence of “weblog” on Scritping News: Dave searches for the first mention of the term weblog on his site and finds one from January 20, 1998.
I thought, hey, sounds like a job for Google Groups. An advanced search for weblog turns up this. Early on weblog referred to those pesky streams of data written by http servers to some obscure spot on your hard drive.
Then on March 24, 1997 this post from the Cyberspace Snow and Avalanche Center hit the rec.skiing and other outdoor newsgroups. In the ‘Organizational’ section of the announcement it mentions “There is now a weblog available online so you can see what has been done lately. ” Cool, an early weblog. Next stop: the Way Back Machine.
The Way back Machine entry for CSAC is here. Of interest is the Feb. 19, 1997 entry.
Near the bottom of the page under “Organizational Information” is this: “
Check our web log to see what we’ve done on the site most recently.” Alas, the web log is not included in the archive, but it certainly seems interesting.
The trail goes cold until Dec. 23, 1997 when Jorn Barger made this announcement to alt.society.neutopia:
After talking a lot about Frontier and Scripting News
(www.scripting.com), I decided to start my own webpage logging the best
stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis:<URL:http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblog.html>
This will cover any and everything that interests me, from net culture
to politics to literature etc.j
And a couple of days later, Dec 25, 1997, on comp.infosystems.www.announce he posted this:
My latest webpage is a daily running log of the best webpages I visit:
<URL:http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblog.html>
If your interests seem to overlap mine, even partially, bookmark this
link and check back every day or so for new discoveries.I suspect that in a year there’ll be hundreds of people maintaining
pages like this, and that this will allow good URLs to spread much more
quickly… so I recommend that all enthusiastic surfers take a shot at
maintaining such a “weblog” (using the Frontier scripting environment, if you need to, for efficiency).j
After that the rest is, as they say history.
technorati tags: dave winer, scripting news, weblog, jorn barger