10th Anniversary of Blogging? Try 12th...

The Wall Street Journal published a story this weekend about how blogging just turned 10 years old in which they give credit to Jorn Barger for starting the first blog in 1997. WSJ also mentions David Winer, father of Dave's Scripting News, and Cameron Barrett, who started CamWorld saying "by widespread consensus, 1997 is a reasonable point at which to mark the emergence of the blog as a distinct life-form."

Duncan Riley's notes that Justin Hall began an online journal with dated daily entries on January 10, 1996 (which Wikipedia agrees with) and that both Hall and Dave Winer started in 1996. "I’ve long disagreed but whether it was Hall or Winer is a moot point: both were blogging in 1996" Riley's A Short History of Blogging is also worth a read.

I take issue with both of their reports because there were a number of people blogging before this and I'm one of them.

I started an online serial publication about Macs, specifically PowerBooks, called O'Grady's 5300 Power Page on 8 December 1995. (You've gotta love The Internet Archive's Way Back Machine). The PowerPage has been publishing daily Mac news continuously since then and will celebrate our 12th anniversary in December.

I started writing The PowerPage in December 2005 when my Global Village PowerPort Platinum Pro Ethernet/modem PCMCIA card wouldn't work properly in my PowerBook 5300CE with Eudora Pro.

I'm not saying that I'm the father of blogging or anything, but I'm probably one of them :)