Tunku Varadarajan at The Wall Street Journal wishes blogging a happy 10th birthday; one problem, blogging is not 10 years old, it’s actually older.

According to my history of blogging (still No. 3 on Google BTW, and heavily researched at the time) blogging turned 11 on January 10, the date in which the first credited blogger (according to Wikipedia as well) Justin Hall commences writing an online journal with dated daily entries, although each daily post is linked through an index page. On 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

In February Dave Winer follows up with a weblog that chronicles the 24 Hours of Democracy Project.

Winer has often claimed that he was the first blogger, I’ve long disagreed but whether it was Hall or Winer is a moot point: both were blogging in 1996, and yet Varadarajan writes this rubbish:

“We are approaching a decade since the first blogger — regarded by many to be Jorn Barger — began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary. On Dec. 23, 1997, on his site, Robot Wisdom, Mr. Barger wrote….”

Um, absolutely not and NO. Barger has always been credited with popularizing the term weblog (although as I found in my research back in 2005 he wasn’t the first to use it the term), but I’ve never read ANYONE claiming that Jorn Barger was the first blogger; even Rebecca Blood’s insular and cliquey history of blogging (written in 2000) which has been at the top of Google for pretty much ever, refers to Berger as coining the term, not creating blogging.

So Tunku Varadarajan: if Barger is “regarded by many” to be the first blogger, name your sources! I checked the first half dozen references on Google, all of them say its Hall except Bloods that doesn’t credit the first blogger. If not: withdraw the article or issue a correction. We expect better from the WSJ, even if most of the rest of the mainstream media has long since moved to the gutter. To others who are blindly joining the celebrations: do some homework before believing everything you read on WSJ.com

Update: Rex Hammock claims in the comments that Dave Winer has never tried to claim credit for being the first blogger, and that this entire article is flawed because that claim is wrong. What’s wrong is that people like Hammond and Varadarajan can’t use Google. To quote Dave Winer on 21 January 2007:

Time flies when you?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re having fun. The 10 year anniversary of Scripting News is approaching and with it, the ten year anniversary of blogging.

I’m not sure how else to interpret that. As for claims that Varadarajan is more correct than my 2005 history of blogging because he writes for the WSJ and I’m nothing more than a lowly blogger: Rex, if you can find references to prove Barger was the first blogger, show me. I can’t and in all my years blogging (many dedicated to writing on the blogging space itself) I’ve never heard Barger being noted as the first blogger. It is arguable when the first blog is written, however it always comes back to Winer or Hall (1996 v 1994 vs early 1997 as well), but never Berger in late 97.

Update 2: Scoble points out that Berger was using a Dave Winer CMS for his blog. So which came first, the chicken or the egg? 🙂 Hammock still arguing over the Winer point in the comments and via email…obviously the concept of “moot point” doesn’t translate: I couldn’t care less whether Dave Winer claimed or didn’t claim to be the first blogger (although he clearly claimed the anniversary for himself), the point is, and has always been, that Winer and Hall predate Barger. Lee Hind also notes in the comments that he was blogging in April 2006. That makes 3 blogs predating Barger by more than 18 months.

Anyone Getting MyBlogLog Spam?

admin —  July 14, 2007 — 4 Comments

I don’t even use MyBlogLog anymore, and yet I keep getting spam emails from MyBlogLog users; advertising networks, Nigerian style scams etc. Am I alone? I probably shouldn’t complain and just switch off the emails and resign my MyBlogLog membership properly..but I thought I’d check.  Looks like Yahoo ownership still hasn’t improved things.

All that is old is new again. I’ve been following in passing the debate over sponsored WordPress themes over the last week or so (Jacob Gower has a good summary, Matt Mullenweg’s post here) and I can’t help but shake my head. As Jacob notes the folks at WordPress and other sites are entitled to feature or not feature what they want, but why the jihad, and why now?

I’ve always had a world of respect and admiration of Matt Mullenweg, but I’m starting to question my past loyalty. Remember this is a guy who got done a couple of years back for running spam on WordPress.org, not just a little bit but a ton of it. I defended him at the time, and I don’t regret doing so, but attacking hard working people from doing sponsored WordPress templates that include one sponsored link in return for a free product? WTF?

Of course there seems to be an aloofness creeping in to WordPress these days as well. I contacted Matt not long after I started writing for TechCrunch with a question about a site being shut down/ removed from WordPress.com, the response I got was terse and down right rude. I sent another email off, thinking that perhaps he’d forgotten my past loyalties to him (being one of the very few people to publicly defend him…heck, even his mother and sister contacted me to thank me for supporting him during the spam crisis) and all I got back was a shit response again. Suffice to say I didn’t send him any more email requests. Really weird though that I’m able to talk to CEO’s of multi-million dollar startups without a problem and yet the only serious grief I’ve had in 3 months at TechCrunch was from Matt Mullenweg.

If it smells like Old Mena and it quacks like Old Mena….

But of course that’s being unfair to Mena. She and I have moved past those dark days of MovableType 3.0 and SixApart is back in the good books, with MT to be open sourced this year. We all get older, wiser…and of course we all make mistakes. (so apologies to Mena if you do take offense at the comparison, none is intended, it’s all about the past, not the present).

I really hope that WordPress and Matt Mullenweg don’t repeat the mistakes of Mena and SixApart in the past…but it’s starting to look that way. What next: WordPress development stops to focus of WordPress.com alone?

And while we’re at it: if we’re on a jihad against links, how about the WordPress team stop stuffing their own links into the standard install of WordPress. WordPress is open source after all, and if we’re all about not benefiting anyone, lets be serious about it. I never want to see a link to Matt Mullenweg’s blog again in WordPress unless it’s linked to the dictionary definition of hypocrite.

Australia’s Cheapest Lego

admin —  July 13, 2007 — 6 Comments

lego But I should add to the post title that it took 30 minutes including me arguing with a Big-W Bunbury floor manager to get this price.

1 big box of lego, advertised (so I found out at the checkout) for $28.88 on special (I’m guessing its usually $40-$50), the floor price as the photo shows:  $8.88. The checkout chick and door person were great, they had to check which is their jobs, but they were good about it. The bitch who met me on the floor on the other hand wasn’t on the same planet: get this, her line was that the lego I was trying to buy was “accidentally” placed on the shelf by a customer and therefore not valid at the price. I asked her repeatedly whether she actually understood what she was saying, given there were 10 other boxes of the EXACT same lego on the shelf how it could be an accident?…indeed the entire display consisted only of the same lego products. It’s only when I started taking pictures and threatening the Trade Practices Act that something was done, by the time I was back at the checkout it was all sorted. Still 30 bloody minutes though. God, I wish we had Wal-Mart in Australia, nothing could be as retarded as anything owned by Coles or Woolworths in comparison…and this is just today’s story, if I blogged every issue I have at one of these stores there would be at least 4 posts a week…like the mole at Coles who bit my head off when I asked where a product was, telling me there was a perfectly good store guide at the end of the isle, or the moldy bread products that were 2 weeks past their use buy date at Woolworths…. 🙂

Podcast Coming Soon

admin —  July 11, 2007 — 7 Comments

For all 5 people who will probably listen, I’m another step forward to a podcast again, after a couple of previously failed attempts at the Blog Herald, then a TPN podcast that never got off the ground as I got caught up running a previous company.

I’ve got the Mic, I’ve got Garage Band and I’ve now got Audio Hijack Pro working + registered. Great program BTW, audio quality recording from Skype was quite remarkable.

It has a running title, but I’m waiting on Cam Reilly to sign off on it and get me set up. Format will be plain old talk, I’ll have a guest on and talk about them and general things. In some ways I might end up being the mini-Cam; GDay World without pissing off and offending quite so many people, but expect the swearing to be occasionally at a similar level.

If you’d like to be a guest, let me know. If you don’t want to be I’ll probably contact some of you and insist anyway. Subject matter is fully open; this won’t be a tech podcast as such although it will probably end up having a strong focus in that direction, Id like for example to highlight some Australian tech success stories.  

More soon. 🙂 

This is hilarious (via FSJ)

J.J. Abrams’ Cloverfield

admin —  July 10, 2007 — 2 Comments

Apparently it’s a NY based monster flick. What ever it is, the trailer is pretty damn cool.

The Onion News Network keeps on getting better and better:
Breaking News: All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash

Bloggin’ down under: the official Google Blog.

OMFG. This post followed the Postini announcement. Could the cliche’s be any thicker and the content more curdling. It’s hard enough having Americans tell you how much they love your accent and thinking that you’ve got a bloody great big knife in your pocket without having the worlds biggest search engine add to the stereotypes.

As for it being NAIDOC week on Google Australia, I didn’t notice because I’m too busy using Google.com. Google.com.au still hasn’t been updated to include the latest UI changes, the ones that allow an easy switch to other Google search services such as Google Blogs. Perhaps the Google Australia team should spend less time with the logos and dicky posts, and more time with the UI. And BTW, Google Maps may have started in Australia, but the imagery still sucks and is in many cases years out of date, my house is still a vacant block despite the pad going down 3 years ago October, and if I use the mapping feature to get out of the estate I’d run straight into a mound of dirt. Please explain! 🙂

(via CrunchGear)