There is a certain fatality associated with trying to assert anything as “truth” when dealing with the internet. Since we live in a world propped up by something as finicky as language, trying to pronounce that someone was the first to do X usually leads to hilarity.

This week it’s a history lesson in blogging.

The blogosphere is honoring someone who really should be honored, Jorn Barger who coined the term weblog just about ten years ago. Unfortunately, a lot of people say he was the first “blogger,” which is completely false.

The History Of Blogging

Popular myth aside, something akin to blogging has existed on the Internet since the dawn of the message board. If you consider blogging as a “conversation” where people share interesting news and links, well then it’s time to admit that modern blogging is just a nice way to arrange one of the pillars that the web itself was built on.

Even if you narrow your definition, as early as 1994 (probably earlier) there were several people doing things that today would be called blogging. The most well known case is Justin Hall, who in 2005 bowed out of the world of online journaling after an eleven year run.

Justin wrote an online journal where he shared his life, love and interests with the world. He finally cut away from the web after he learned one of the hard lessons about sharing a lot of personal information online, some of the people around you will find it extraordinarily creepy. His site now stands as a testament to just that fact.

Depending on how stringent a definition of blogging you want to subscribe to, everyone from Justin to Jorn to Dave Winer could be its father. Chances are good that none of these men really invented blogging, more than they were major milestones in the development of the idea of online journaling.

Web 2.0 Roundup

While none of this takes away from the fact that every one of blogging’s parents deserves his due, this should go as a little lesson. It’s a difficult enough task to decide on the inventor or something concrete, ask any a patent lawyer, but it’s a hundred times more difficult to trace the ancestry of a concept.

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