Christmas came a day early at Eye on Winer: NPR has begun a week-long history of blogging that doesn’t exaggerate Dave Winer’s grandiose and bogus claim to have originated the medium.
NPR’s first audio story, seven minutes that are incredibly funny and include interviews with Justin Hall and Peter Merholz, comes with a blogging timeline prepared by Andy Carvin, an NPR online exec and online diarist since 1994. As you might expect from a person who was writing chronological updates on his life and work years before Winer began Scripting News in 1997, Carvin groups Winer with online journals and other personal sites that were bloglike before the term existed.
Here’s the part that put the coal in Winer’s stocking — the timeline of blogging begins counting up from the day Jorn Barger came up with the term weblog.
December 1997: Jorn Barger starts a daily log of interesting Web links published in reverse chronological order, calling it Robot Wisdom WebLog. The term “Weblog” is soon generalized by other online publishers to include any page with frequent short posts in reverse chronological order.
There’s nothing unfair about this logic. It’s completely reasonable to decide that blogging didn’t start until the term “weblog” was coined to describe the practice. Even more fair is to place the medium in context with the seminal stuff that came before. Back in 1997, Winer owed a debt to the publishers who came before him — one he rarely if ever acknowledges. Blogging did not spring whole from his skull like Athena from Zeus.
But as you might have guessed, Blogfather don’t play that way. Six a.m. Pacific on Christmas Eve, and Ebenezer Dave wakes up kvetching and bullying Carvin on Twitter:
davewiner: @acarvin, like so many before, confuses the naming of blogs with the invention of blogs. barger wasn’t the first, for the 180th time. about two hours ago
davewiner: btw if you’re going to publish yet another wrong timeline of blogging, why not allow for comments so people can correct your mistakes. about two hours ago
davewiner: @acarvin, jorn copied me, used my software, as did all the early bloggers. if you dispute that, where your evidence? 35 minutes ago
davewiner: @acarvin, and you’re not consistent. according to your logic, the moment podcasting started was when the word was chosen. 34 minutes ago
davewiner: @acarvin, in both cases, we needed a word for what we were doing. when jorn came up with weblog, we all went with it. he wasn’t the leader. 33 minutes ago
davewiner: and the really shameful thing about it is that the record is all there, in the archives. if you wanted to do it right you could have. 33 minutes ago
davewiner: @acarvin, i saw that i’m in the timeline for other things, but i want credit for the work i did. it was hard and not obvious stuff andy. 19 minutes ago
davewiner: there were quite a few bloggers before barger, notably kottke and camworld. look at blogtree for a record of who inspired who. 16 minutes ago
davewiner: blogtree is offline, but it’s all in archive.org’s database. 15 minutes ago
davewiner: @rexhammock, thanks! and with that, i’ll say no more about NPR, and I’ll avoid listening to it this week to keep from getting depressed. 2 minutes ago
On and on it goes, always to the central theme of Winer’s professional life: The work I did was important, influential and instrumental. The work others did was incremental and insignificant. In keeping with the season, every idea he’s ever had was a virgin birth.
Oh hell, everyone knows that the first blog was the Mozilla “What’s Hot” page that must date back to the earliest days of the web, like 1993. And there are many others who were blogging well before dave.
This is just so much petty egotistical bullshit, when dave is dead and gone, nobody will be left who gives a shit about who invented blogging. Note to dave: the only reason people love to write about the history of blogging is because they can piss you off by omitting you.