Ray Davis, whose Bellona Times is one of the Grand Old Blogs, thought
that if I’m going to be flippant about the history of weblogs, I should at
least get it right:
I was startled to find this in your Bloomsday
post:
"But in 1999 relatively few people had begun to
figure out the power of blogs – the most notable example at that point was Matt
Drudge, impersonating the worst journalist imaginable, right down to the pork
pie hat."
Equivalently, "Before the 1990s, by far the most
powerful member of the Language Poets was Bret Easton Ellis." Drudge
called himself a journalist, the world called him by a variety of names, but no
one called him a weblogger. His only connection with the form is that he
self-published on the web.
When I started my own serial in the summer of 1999, the
most notable weblog was Robot Wisdom,
whose author invented the term. The group of young web designers who later
tended to be referred to as "the A-list" were
well under way (including the coiner of "blog" and the developers of
the software you use to post your own material). Among those 1999-era weblogs
more focused on aesthetic issues, Alamut and NQPaOFU (both established 1998) are still going.
I expect that what you meant was "But in 1999 I
didn't read any blogs, and Ben Friedlander probably didn't either."
There's no shame in that.
Best,
Ray
I can’t say I disapprove of any impulse to reject
Matt Drudge, even if I want to quibble that “publishes a daily journal” &,
especially in his case, maintains a huge blogroll, might qualify Drudge under
any definition I to which I might agree. Mark Glaser includes Drudge in his
chart of “most
influential bloggers,” the lead story at UCLA’s Online Journalism Review
site.
In a follow-up note, Ray added:
If you'd like a more appropriate link than my own site,
Rebecca Blood's 2000 history is still not a bad introduction, although it
predates the explosive growth of insular weblogging communities outside the
web-designer world (political mobs, humanities grad students, and, most
recently, poets).
http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html
Best,
Ray
But then Ray changed his mind:
Curious, I did the webberly
thing and searched the literature – only to find that what I'd called
"revisionist history" began (as it often does) very early on as
"revisionist journalism." Although Drudge himself has expressed his
typical mindless hostility toward weblogs, and although I don't know of any
webloggers who were sired or dammed by Drudge's site, in fact quite a few of
the early mainstream articles on weblogging pointed to the Drudge Report as an
example. I imagine the usual under-the-deadline fluff-up-what-you-already-know
factors were at work. "A bunch of updated links?
Sounds like what Drudge is doing."
That's understandable. Journalists crave definitions, and when
a form or a genre is coalescing, definitions are hard to make sense of. For
example, this May 1999 piece from Salon
(written about the time I was plotting out my web magazine and realizing that
my idea of a proper "web magazine" matched the new form fairly well):
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/rose/1999/05/28/weblogs/print.html
disqualifies Drudge because of his lack of a
"personal voice," but keeps the pure link lists.
So I apologize for my reaction: you weren't being
eccentric; instead, I was being too much the insider. A nasty sin for someone
who sets such great store by exogamy....
Best,
Ray
That ellipsis belongs to
Ray. The eccentricity is all mine.
