news.com enters the who was the first blogger debate.
Justin Hall was the first blogger. Dave Winer wrote the first blogging CMS.
I don’t want to take away from Dave, and indeed he deserves far better treatment in the blogosphere and MSM than he gets, he did many, many great things that were not only vital, but intrinsic in the foundation of the blogosphere and the craft of blogging we know it today, but I can’t rewrite history, and Dave was second. As I wrote 2 years ago at The Blog Herald:
In January 1994, Justin Hall launches Justin?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Home Page which would later become Links from the Underground. The site included links to and reviews of other sites. Notably on 10 January 1996, Hall commences writing an online journal with dated daily entries, although each daily post is linked through an index page. Of the journal he writes
?¢‚Ǩ?ìSome days, before I go to bed, I think about my day, and how it meshed with my life, and I write a little about what learned me.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù
OK, so maybe I don’t own the authority site on blog history any more, but even to this day I’ve been an avid follower of statistics, and a compiler of history.
The next part in that post should be noted:
In February 1996, Dave Winer writes a weblog that chronicles the 24 Hours of Democracy Project.
In April, Winer launches a news page for users of Frontier Software, that goes onto became Scripting News in 1997, one of the oldest weblogs remaining on the net today. The company he heads, Userland goes on to release Radio Userland, one of the first blogging software tools.
I’m didn’t make this stuff up, this is verbatim as to how the history of blogging occurred, indeed the post was part of my never completed blogging book project, which still sits on my hard drive somewhere, having gotten to about 40 pages then stopped…I should find the time to start it again…but I digress, because that history was heavily researched at the time, and I have NO reason to believe two years later that it is anything but accurate. I really, really do hope that one day a statue of Dave Winer will grace Berkley, he deserves it, but it won’t be as the first blogger, but the blog father, the founder of the blogging platform, not blogging as such.
