I see a lot of claims out there by people who claim to be the first blogger because they began doing it in 1997 or something like that. Well, I do not know if I am the first one ever, but I am certainly one of the first ones. In November 1994, I sat in Central Park and saw something funny. I went upstairs to my sister’s office in the Hotel des Artistes building (home of Café Des Artistes) and updated my website (manually because it was 1994) to include a new page about observations and wrote about it. And it’s still on the web today! In fact, almost everything I wrote about from 1994 to 2002 is available in an archive of my website as it was before I finally changed it all up and built a brand new one.
This site is a continuation of that second-gen site that I made in 2002. At that time, I believe I switched to Dave Winer’s Radio Userland tool and used that for some years. Then I experimented with Movable Type and a number of other tools. Then in Steptember, 2008, just over 10 years ago, I switched to WordPress and that’s been the engine behind my site ever since. (And considering I now work for the WordPress people, I highly doubt I will be changing my site out for something else any time soon!)
And blogging as a term did not come into usage until 1997 or so. So I don’t know what you call what I did for those first three years. Public journaling? Who knows? And, like I said, I do not claim to be the first, but I was certainly among the first ones. How many others have blog-style posts that are still online from November 1994 or before? Maybe one day I will try to find out.