Paula tagged me with the 23rd-post-5th-sentence meme.

I rarely do the tagging/meme biz. Seems akin to chain letters.

However, just this once ...

The fifth sentence of the twenty-third post ever on this blog:

Monday, February 25, 2002

I sent a note John Paczkowski at the Merc to find a link to the 9-11 blog that was also referenced in the article. John sez they're moving the archival stuff over to the new Web location and it should be available in a few days. (sorry! one sentence too many!)

In those days I oft times used the blog to reference the URLs I was using in my column and to make some use of the (usually huge) batch of URLs that didn't make the cut. In this case, between the time I'd submitted the February 2002 column and it had come out in print, several URLs had changed and I was updating the info.

The February 2002 column began thusly,

Blogs
Indecent exposures and passions on the Web ... by Sal Towse

Weblogs (aka "blogs," to spare fast talkers and slow typers that extra syllable) are Web-based collections of short snippets of content arranged in reverse chronological order. Sometimes they're stand-alone 'zine-like collections of articles by multiple authors or collections of annotated links giving in-depth coverage of a given subject. Whether the product of an individual or a group, whether standalone or chronological, they chronicle deep interests and passions.

Tim Berners-Lee is credited by some for producing the first weblog, his World Wide Web News. Beginning in January, 1992, back even before DARPA (the U.S. government's Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) provided seed funding for the World Wide Web Consortium, Tim BL kept the cognoscenti up-to-date with what was happening with the W3 project using a periodically updated newsletter.

That update, the WWW News, was distributed both on line at w3.org and also sent as plain text for those who weren't able to browse the WWW yet. WWW News included hypertext links to new projects and content available on the World Wide Web.

Some claim that although WWW News had hypertext links to other WWW sites it wasn't really a blog. They point to Mosaic's What's New page, which burst on the scene the following year and listed all the cool new sites that were popping up like California mushrooms after a November rain.

The thing I really liked about that column was the way it almost wrote itself.

Hey. THAT must be the reason why ...

Web logs (aka "blogs" to spare all us fast talkers and slow typers that extra syllable) have been around since Tim Berners-Lee was a pup.

Berners-Lee, in fact, is given credit for the first Web log with his World Wide Web News pages. Starting in January 1992, Tim BL kept the cognoscenti up-to-date with what was happening with the W3 project with a periodically updated log, including hypertext links to new content available on the still-a-borning Web.

Was WWW News an online newsletter or blog? Hard to say, but because Tim BL was keeping it, the bloggers tend to point to his work as the granddaddy of blogging.

Was neither the first time nor the last that I'd taken something I was rambling on about on Usenet and turned it into something that paid.

[Yes, I am way behind with uploading all my Computer Bits columns and articles to towse.com -- now that the Computer Bits Web site archive is no more. Two down, a few score or more to go.]

   posted by Sal Towse at  3:16 PM|| |