Blogs. Weblogs. Bloggering. Now an activity shrouded in the mists of the Old Internet, but in its day a pioneering way for people to share links and photos and stuff. Even older than YouTube.
Depending on who you ask, the first bloggering happened in the late 1990s, when the web was still young, and clicking links to pages where you’d click more links was cool. This was in the days when the only use for an animated GIF was to tell people you were still working on your web page. Even if you weren’t.
“I invented bloggering,” says mad old Laurence Fortey, a mad old internet guy from the old, old days. He can remember hand-coded websites. He started coding his own just weeks after Tim Berners-Lee, a tunnel engineer helping to build the STERN protein collider, discovered ancient scrolls buried in the Swiss soil that revealed the secrets of HTML.
Fortey didn’t call it bloggering then, of course.
“I didn’t know it was going to be called that,” he says now, interviewed in a hotel room in Chicago. “We had other names for it back then. FTP diary-ing. Internet log link sharing. Web journalizing.”
Fortey sits back in his comfortable chair, eyes upward, remembering. His hair and beard are huge, wild. Perhaps someone should switch that fan off, it’s blowing right into his face.
“It was good back then,” he says. “No comments. No one had invented comments. Oh God, comments.”
Another early bloggerer was Fran Lilley, later a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur but at the time winding up her first graduate degree.
“We started bloggering when we were still on Gopher,” she recalls. “We’d write up text files and upload them to Gopherspace, which was a bit like Twitter is now. But without the lolcats.”
She remembers clearly how blogging changed and grew as more people got involved: “We all thought it was pretty cool when you could put words and pictures together on the same page. That beat the heck out of Gopherspace, let me tell you.”
“Once blogging software came along and all the other stuff got added in, we thought we were in heaven.”
Categories and archives were Lilley’s favorite new ideas.
“Categories were great! Suddenly all your stuff was, like, totally categorized. OK, so a lot of the time it was categorized in the ‘Uncategorized’ category, but even so. Archives were so much more useful after that.”
Lilley pauses to watch raindrops on the window. “Well, a bit more useful.”
Asked to make some comments about comments, she grimaces and turns her attention back to the raindrops.
by Giles Turnbull, TMN | Read more:
Image: William Powhida, A Major B-List Celebrity, 2013
