So who really invented Weblogs?
In this year, the 10th anniversary of the coining of the word weblog, CNET.com sets out to see who was the inventor of blogs. Turns out, it has its origins in the 1970s, but its present form is 10 years old.
The PJNet.org is four years old and got started because my online community organizing mentor Griff Wigley told me it would be a perfect tool for the Public Journalism Network and it was. So I know who invented this blog, but who, in fact, invented the weblog is a little mushier. Here is David Winer’s reaction to the CNET.com article:
CNet searches for the creator of the first blog. That would beTim Berners-Lee, whose first website was, in every way, a blog…I think the CNet article misses something important as they make light of my claim to having bootstrapped blogging. The first blogs were inspired by this blog, in fact many of them, including Barger’s Robot Wisdom, used my software. If you go to BlogTree, a site that asks bloggers to say which sites inspired them, you’ll see how many self-declare as originating from the Scripting News community. How you summarize that effect is up to you, I call it a bootstrap.
I was trying to disperse the community that developed around this blog, from the beginning. The goal being to inspire other people to do the same as I was doing. Jason Kottke once called me the Johnny Appleseed of blogging, and that’s something I’m happy with. That was my intention.
Finally back to Griff for a minute. Here is a phrase he picked up from Wikinomics and is incorporating into this own work:
How can online “weapons of mass collaboration” be used to strengthen the fabric of local neighborhoods and communities?
