oldest blog

28 Jun 2005

Bill’s comment over at this post got me thinking. I wonder what the oldest example of something that qualifies as a “blog” on the Internet was?

If we take “blogging” to represent a community of people using the Internet to exchange ideas, argue about politics, flame and generally harass one another, etc, then blogging is pretty clearly just picking up where the USENET community left off after it was destroyed by porn and spam – allowing for some growth, as well, as the Internet in general gets bigger.

But if we take “blogging” to represent “posting dated log entries to the web”, I am not sure of the earliest example. Memepool was probably one of the first to get closer to blogging as we know it now, but that was as late as 1998, so maybe not. Mirsky’s Worst of the Web was around from a very early date. archive.org has entries on Mirsky’s dated as early as January 1, 1995 – was it hosted somewhere else before that, even?

Can anyone think of something that fits the bill before that?