http://www.nahenahe.net/1997.html http://www.nahenahe.net/1998.html

It was Frontier managed, and it remained this way until Dave shipped Manila. I got one of the first EditThisPage.com sites on Dec. 4, 1999, and still use it.

I believe that gulker.com was around back then, and he used to have a list of other sites at the time, all of which were bloggish. He no longer has that stuff online.

http://www.links.net/daze/

http://w6.winn.com/w6index95.html http://w6.winn.com/w6index96.html http://w6.winn.com/w6index97.html

Derek Powazek started Fray in 1996.

In 95 and 96 dozens of people were self publishing on the web, but it probably wasn't blogging yet.

Peter Merholz' archives go back to mid 1998.

In June of 1997 Dave Winer linked to Cameron Barrett... http://www.camworld.com/archives/000010.html

The permalink paradigm didn't happen until 2000 some time.

Zeldman has been publishing since 95 or so, but he probably didn't start blogging per se until 97 or 98.

The list goes on...

... standing on the shoulders of giants.

Frank Paynter

http://www.toxiccustard.com/diary/

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.toxiccustard.com/diary/

You can see the original NETTLE page (complete with @-sign based fonts!) at this URL: http://www.nettle.com/old-nettle/index.html

- Brian

The other early ones I had questions about: More Like This didn't start until October of 1998, and Honeyguide didn't happen until June of '98. What about Wes Felter?

Yes, there were journalers on the web since early (Bryon Sutherland, anyone?), but that mix of links and short commentary in the reverse chronological format that, sometime in 1999, came to be called "blog" was pretty sparse in 1997.

I created Lotus Notes support databases at Cisco in 1998-99, and then switched to using Frontier in 2000, because it was easier and faster.

MGI Software's customer and product support databases were done in Frontier and had over 7,000 registered editors.

NewsTrolls http://www.newstrolls.com started in September, 1998, but the blogging format had been started well before that as a series of regular posts in the old HotWired Media Rant Threads (under the heading Media Rant News Trolls).

http://web.archive.org/web/19981203095447/http://huldra.evang.priv.no/

http://web.archive.org/web/19981207024628/huldra.evang.priv.no/~huldra/dagbok.html

It wasn't really a blog, if a blog must be updated daily or weekly.

The Internet Archive first captured it in late '98:

http://web.archive.org/web/19981212020904/http://sbw.org/

Initially, I created the site in WebExpress. By September '98, my authoring tool was a home-grown Lotus Notes application running on my Windows desktop, automatically synchronized with a hosted Lotus Notes web server. Very much like current blogging tools.

Now it's a bunch of home-grown PHP scripts.

The Internet Archive's has:

http://web.archive.org/web/19991012124857/http://www.best.com/~davep/index.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20000208140411/http://davespicks.com/index.html

for before and after the move. It was defnitely Scripting News that inspired me in the early days, though the Cool Site of the Day was also a big deal, and I'd call that a blog, as well, and it started in August 1994:

http://www.coolsiteoftheday.com/cgi-bin/stillcool.pl?month=08&year=1994

I'm going to copy this off, because I'm always afraid of things getting "lost" on the web.

I suspect this really looks like a series of interconnected "suns" with rays going out from important starting points, especially Dave Winer's activities at Userland. Perhaps we can draw the map?

If you're talking about what someone output, then there were a LOT of blogs. If you're talking about someone using some sort of personal templated CMS application that we've come to think of as blogging software, then we're probably talking about a handful.

Plenty of people toiled away in ocscurity, never to be named along with any of the more well known bloggers. Heck some of us have been doing this non-stop since 1997 and still aren't even known by name.

Very few, if any, outbound links, granted, but I deny that the definition of blog necessitates them.

This be the verse! They f you up, your pioneer blogger and homepage ;-)

http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

All of this was done with UserLand Frontier; version 1.0 of which was released in January 1992, and I'd had some beta versions. NCSA Mosaic, by Marc Andreessen et alia, arrived in early 1993. (This was the era of Serial Line Internet Protocol, SLIP; Point-to-Point Protocol, PPP, was still a long time in coming. It was the height of geekdom to be able to have several open command-line terminal windows active over one modem connection, so one could have separate spaces for ones Gopher, Archie, and Lynx browsing.)

Rebecca Blood writes "Jesse's 'page of only weblogs' lists the 23 known to be in existence at the beginning of 1999." Perhaps for some bizarre definition of 'blog. If you mean to say that SIX YEARS after Wired magazine's issue 1.01 came out (Mar/Apr 1993) there were only 23 people posting "periodic posts on a common webpage... often but not necessarily in reverse chronological order" [Wiki], I got a big bridge to sell you.

Dave Winer - the creator of Frontier - started his 'blog at the end of April 1997, wherein he speaks of Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0. Not 1.0. For crying out loud, the fruit-colored Apple iMacs were introduced in August 1998 to a world that was already very comfortable with modems, the web, etc.

It's true that each generation remembers history as starting in their lifetimes, but y'all need to be a bit more careful with your assertions. Why, back then, we didn't even have...

http://geektimes.com/michael/frontier/sitesWithFrontier4/frontier-web-maint-2.html

My 1999 there was a lot more going on than 23 blogs...

But the development of the web over those first years was a lot slower than most people remember. While there were magazine pages up there (I registered and abandoned several domains as attempts to get web based magazine pages started), discovering Dave's Scripting News over that period where Steve Jobs was going back to Apple was a real eye-opener (I worked for Pixar, so that was the hook). Rather than publishing on a schedule Scripting News was continuously published, relied on outside links so that one person could keep the critical mass for a site like that going, and used tools to make that easy.

Yes, there were journals back in 1994 (I mentioned Bryon Sutherland), and yes, there were reverse chronological links pages early on, but whatever that phenomenon was that became "blogs" (and was "microportals" and all sorts of other things before Jorn Barger's "weblog" became the common usage), it really didn't happen until mid to late 1999.

A year and a half ago, in response to a claim Dave made about the history of weblogs, I asked for weblogs not done in Frontier as of May 1999. It's been a long time since my web site could be called "A-list", but I've got some interesting email addresses, so I sent out a call for contributions. That list ain't long.

Yeah, maybe it was just a group that formed around Dave's site and and the world was full of weblogs already, but it was at the dinners of that crowd where I met Ev and Meg and Jack from Pyra, and the LiveJournal folks, and that group was also where I saw that web publications weren't either magazines, continuously updated and re-edited documents (like my whitewater pages), or angsty diaries with few links to elsewhere and no real sense of being a part of something larger.

See, I don't see Frontier or Blogger or LiveJournal as creating a new category sui generis. Rather, they were tools to automate what people were already doing by hand.

I'm thinking here particularly of Derek's former partners in crime like Magdalena Donea, Lance Arthur, and Alexis Massie (whom I collectively thought of as "The Chicago School", but that's because I found Maggy first), but also such communities as Karawynn Long's People Chase ring.

Hell, what about Cool Site of the Day?

It's no longer online, but you can find it in the Wayback Machine.