In search of the creator of the first blog

[phranque]

It may not be one of the Internet's grandest accomplishments, but with the number of active bloggers hovering somewhere around 100 million, according to one estimate, there are some serious bragging rights to be claimed by the first person who provably laid fingers to keyboard in the traditional bloggy way.

Was the first blogger the irascible Dave Winer? Or was it the iconoclastic Jorn Barger? Or was the first blogger really Justin Hall, a Web diarist and online gaming expert whom The New York Times Magazine once called the "founding father of personal blogging"?

2007 is the 10th anniversary of the blog.
fun and interesting history in CNET News.com [news.com.com]

[Brett_Tabke]

I had a weekly personal music column on my C=64 BBS in 1984. Would that count? We didn't call it a blog, but it was blog none-the-less. It was even tied to the board msg'ing system and people could comment in email or post in one of the subboards about it.

[jtara]

Um, we used to have another name for it.

"What's New".

[jomaxx]

This question seems obviously unanswerable. At best you might be able to identify the first such site that was called a blog. That's a neologism whose origin might well be traceable.

[coopster]

According to wikipedia:

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May of 1999. This was quickly adopted as both a noun and verb ("to blog," meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog").

[phranque]

was that BBS considered "web"?

blog implies web and web implies http protocol.
if it preexisted 12/17/97 as a web-implemented bbs...

[physics]

If you define a blog as having an xml feed then I think Dave Winer was the first:

[pbs.org...]

[pbs.org...]

[scripting.com...]

[physics]

According to Dave's scripting.com site his first blog was started on 2/27/96:
[scripting.com...]

[Easy_Coder]

Yeah I always thought Dave Winer was first too.

[phranque]

if you read the article you will find that the definer of the term has determined that dave messed up the reverse chronological ordering and therefore disqualifies himself as the first canonical weblog.