10 years, 100 million blogs and a new blog every second , yet, we still don’t know the founder of the blog. While Tim Berner’s Lee is credited as the founder of the world wide web and Vint Cerf as one of the founding fathers of the Internet. There is still no consensus on who started the first blog.
But there are a few contenders for the title of “First Blogger” . Dave Winer is one of the contenders, his website Scripting News is believed to be one of the first blogs and has been running since 1997. But Winer did not coin term “Web log”(although he founded a company called Weblogs.com which was later bought by VeriSign, read here) and claims that the first blogs were inspired by Scripting News.(Source)
While Winer did not coin the term, John Barger did and thus proclaims himself to be the father of the blog. The last contender in this race is Justin Hall, a Web diarist and online gaming expert whom The New York Times Magazine once called the “founding father of personal blogging”. But just hold on, if just talking about something can make you it’s founder then there is yet another contender for this title, a 19th Century Russian Prince by the name of Vladimir Odoevsky.
Odoevsky, was a gifted man who apart from writing philosophical books, stories for children and composing pieces of music, also wrote science fiction, trying to imagine what his country would look like in 2,500 years, in 4338. Odoevsky suggested in future there would be a kind of connection between houses that would allow people to communicate quickly and easily, the way they do now via the Internet.
Houses are connected by means of magnetic telegraphs that allow people who live far from each other to communicate, Odoevsky wrote. Even more interestingly, Odoevsky suggested every household would publish a kind of daily journal or newsletter and distribute it among selected acquaintances, a habit which Russian bloggers immediately recognized as blogging(Source).
The Blog continues to grow at a rapid rate today and has spawned a social revolution bringing to the fore thousands of information savvy Citizen Journalists(better known as CJ’s). So while it’s good to hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil, you can always use the blog to convey what you wanna say, just like our friends below.
