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.

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.

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.”

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.

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..)

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

(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