rc3.org Strong opinions weakly held

Thanks for the kind words, Rafe! Glad you’re enjoying the book. A few notes:

(1) Eaton is actually in the book (briefly). The mention is more in the context of “lists of blogs” (A-list, Technorati, etc.) so comes later in the book than the discussion of blogrolls.

(2) It’s true I didn’t cover Greymatter, nor did I devote a lot of space to the Trotts/the SixApart saga, which has been widely covered elsewhere. After the Blogger chapter I felt I’d written about as much about blogging software as the book could support. There could easily be a whole volume on the topic.

(3) This is, I hope, good news: I am planning to launch, before the book’s release, a wiki called bloghistory.org where I’m going to post all my research and invite people to add their own additions. Sort of an open space for anyone who feels “hey, why didn’t you mention X or cover Y?” to add it themselves.

More on that as I get it together. Of course, I’m way behind

Posted by Scott Rosenberg on 24 June 2009 @ 12am

I’m looking forward to reading this too, and like you, am an old timer that could have made more contributions back in the old days. I think Phillyfuture might be among the ‘first’ locally focused blogs. Maybe

Especially happy to see Justin Hall and Electric Minds – I loved that place as well.

Posted by Karl on 24 June 2009 @ 7am

Oh, I don’t think I’m going to be able to read the bit about the ‘warbloggers’ – I’m sure it will make me alternately nauseous and furious revisiting some of that.

I’ve read the 2 chapters that are up online and share your impression that nothing is egregiously wrong — and how RARE IS THAT??

And a big hearty ‘ditto’ on your last bullet point. But you are going great guns right now! Really good stuff here of late. (I on the other hand am currently reduced to wondering how much of my kid’s potty exploits I should blog – but really, I will be back! Someday..)

Posted by Medley on 24 June 2009 @ 8am

Comment systems changed blogging in an interesting way, and it will be interesting to see if this is touched upon. Time was that if someone had something to say about what someone else had written they’d do it on their site, with a link back. A conversation would develop, frequently involving multiple sites, and this was often a useful way to discover different points of view, and new voices.

Blogs are vast now, and contain multitudes, so it would be difficult to generalize, but I think a case could be made that there has been some loss of civility that can be attributed to the fact that it is now more common to post a comment to someone else’s post, rather than to engage in a site-to-site conversation.

Posted by Bill on 24 June 2009 @ 9am

Speaking of old times, I think I’ve been reading your blog for ten years man. Even if I don’t comment all that often

Posted by Karl on 24 June 2009 @ 10am

Before comment systems were pervasive in blogs, a few bloggers actually took time to read all of the email they received, weed it down and publish just the best stuff. I remember Dave Winer doing this very early on and it was a thrill to make it into one of his Scripting News Mail Pages he put up every week or so.

When I met with Scott in NYC I forgot to mention that there was a very early group of online diarists who were struggling with whether or not they wanted to be called bloggers. They called themselves Everything/Nothing pages or E/N Pages for short. I brought these to attention back in 1999 when Dave was starting to talk about who pioneered blogging and when.

I too am disillusioned about how the “warbloggers” changed the face of blogging. In some ways their hidden (and not-so-hidden) agendas sucked the life out of blogging that made it fun, engaging and personal. It’s also one of the reasons I stopped blogging for long periods of time. I simply did not want to be known as a blogger for fear of being mistaken for being a “warblogger”, which in my mind was synonymous with “raving lunatic from the right wing nutjob convention.”

Posted by Cameron Barrett on 24 June 2009 @ 10am

Interesting. I’m reading Chapter 1 right now and thinking “oh, yeah, these were the people I did my best to ignore”. I may have to read this to catch up; while I was bemoaning that “The Semi-Existence of Bryon” (Sutherland) was being abandoned, the rest of the world was latching on to Justin and the suck.com crowd.

To Rafe’s “…I didn’t make the contributions I could have back in the olden days.” comment, I’ll engage in a bit of nostalgia. I preferred blogging back then, when we had cross-blog conversations and all the other good stuff of those days, and I’m not sure that most of what’s happened since then has been a contribution. If your bigger impact from here on out can help us get back some of the conversation that we had back then, rather than the one-sided yelling and incessant pitching that seems to have replaced it, then I welcome it. Give me the environment that spawned Cam emailing me and saying “you don’t know me except that I linked to you, but I’m coming out to SF for a job interview, can I crash on your couch?” over what we ended up with every time.

Posted by Dan Lyke on 24 June 2009 @ 11am

The most awesome thing about blogging for these past 10 years? Still corresponding with so many of the people I met through blogging back then here, on Twitter, and elsewhere.

Posted by Rafe on 24 June 2009 @ 12pm

Rafe: Thanks for posting the review, and for the shout-outs to EatonWeb and Noah Grey (who merits inclusion in any blog history not just for Greymatter but for his photography and the way he told his own story).

Scott: As a big fan of Dreaming in Code, I can’t wait to dive into Say Everything. I’ve recommended DiC to many, many folks as the best introduction I know to programming culture for non-programmers. (As one of the people swayed by Jim Fallows’s endorsement of Agenda, I also had high hopes for Chandler.)

Cameron: Your blog (with its smartly curated blogroll) and Rafe’s were two of the sites that first showed me what the Web might make possible.

Thanks to all.

Posted by John on 26 June 2009 @ 4pm