Who wrote the first blog? Justin Hall’s self-indulged portal? Dave Weiner who developed Scripting News? This question is a bit difficult to answer, but it isn’t the proper question to be asking. Of course, there were a few noteworthy characters and events. Of course, as with any Web 2.0 tale, there is a tinge of some Silicon Valley venture capital money involved in its nascent stages. Nevertheless, Scott Rosenberg’s Say Everything offers something a bit subtler to the story of the blog. Rosenberg’s account is a traditional, yet slightly ubiquitous, “How did X techno/media platform came to be?” narrative. However, Say Everything presents the weblog as an outgrowth of our natural tendencies to share “ourselves” with others. In fact, Rosenberg highlights that early proto-blogs were autobiographies that heavily relied on links.
I argue that the notion of a blog, divorced from its digital form, is nothing really new. We’ve been blogging for quite some time now, just not in 1s and 0s. Would Thomas Paine’s Common Sense pass for a blog if I added a dot com at the end and saved it as a PDF? I don’t claim that political blogging during the 2000 election, in the way I’m arguing to define it, was as virulent as it was during the first presidential election (although I’m sure that since George Washington was appointed, and never elected, it would have made for a great posting). However, Thomas Paine had been a relatively obscure player in the early days of the Republic before Common Sense. Paine expressing his views and sharing these views with fellow colonists captures Say Everything’s notion of a blog.
If the notion of a blog is nothing really new, then the question must shift from who wrote the first blog to what conditions engendered its success in digital form. Hence, Say Everything asks who and what established the norms that eventually shaped what we consider to be blogging today. Although to some extent an historical narrative, Say Everything is not about the harrowing tale of the blog. This is largely because the story of blogs lacks the Steve Jobs, the Bill Gates or the Mark Zukerberg of Apple, Microsoft or Facebook, respectively. Moreover, most upheavals in what is established start with a single idea, granted eternal life among academic circles for the sake of creating more neologisms and PhD dissertations. However, Rosenberg’s story of blogging also lacks a groundbreaking, radical maximum for the masses. Newton, Einstein, and Keynes largely drove each of their respective paradigm shifts. I find it hard to equate Hall posting nude photos of himself on his blog, among other hyper-personal revelations, as the basis for inciting a revolution in thought.
The story of the blog is not a linear story, with clearly defined heroes and villains. Launching blogging from the “technological ghetto” among a handful of early adopters in San Francisco to main street “ICP” is a success story of the individual. The norms established by the countless bloggers now dotting the growing landscape continue to evolve. Therefore, I claim “Who wrote the first blog” is no where as nearly an interesting question as “What will the next one be about?
