How Blogging Really Started

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Dave Winer has claimed to have invented blogging, to have been the impetus, the motivation behind the wave, the foundation of the coral reef that blogging has become . The thing about ideas on the internet is that at least 20 people are having the same ideas as you at any one time. If ideas are countries, then it's like 20 discoverers landing on different parts of the same shoreline completely unaware of the others until they meet in the middle.

Well I know the real reason blogging started: Quake! In june 1996, id Software released Quake and created a revolution: online multiplayer gaming. The reverse chronological web log format was used by Quake players and Quake clans (teams) to participate in the online gaming community.

Here's my proof, one of the pioneers of the Quake community, Stephen "Blue" Heaslip, creator of Blues News. Here is a copy of his early blog courtesy of the Way Back Machine. When did he start blogging? September 1996. Booyah!

The online gaming community's use of the web was constantly improving. It was an ecosystem that evolved to keep players informed about the software and hardware, teams and scores, available servers. It was also a social network that allowed players to keep track of each other and organise meetups both online (on game servers) and in real life (at LANs). Players, both indivudually and cooperatively, used their 'blogs' to post news, recent matches, opinions, flames, screenshots, 3d models, player skins, maps and so on. As a community it was sharing, enthusiastic and passionate, a large part of which came from the fact that it was new and revolutionary..

Clan web logs typically had 3 column layouts (centre blog column), reverse chronological entries, blog rolls (for linking to other clans), web page widgets for showing game server status, launching games and online availability (via ICQ). The community spawned other innovations like game server clients, that used the internet to query game servers for their current status. Some clients even allowed you to subscribe to text files lists of server addresses that server administrators would host on their webservers. We had voice clients so we could talk to each other using a microphone and headphones during a game or for online gatherings.

My own contribution, Evil Empire , still exists today. In mid 1998 it was database driven, had a web interface for adding posts, had an 'edit this page' style link (see the little [^e] link at the bottom), had multiple authors, had multiple categories for posts and so on. But I'd never heard of Dave Winer!

In all seriousness I don't think anyone actually invented or discovered blogging. Like a lot of things on the internet is was a natural organic evolution of the medium in response to the desire of people to find each other's voices. For anyone to claim that they personally were the motivation for people wanting to blog is just plain silly.

See the follow-up:  More on the Origins of Blogging

Random outings from a chaotic mind