The blog bootstrap

Tuesday, March 20, 2007 by Dave Winer.

CNet searches for the creator of the first blog. That would be Tim Berners-Lee, whose first website was, in every way, a blog. A couple of comments. 1. Not sure how he tried to get in touch but I never got a call or an email. 2. I don't want to take anything away from anyone else. Lots of people made weblogs what they are today. Why not be inclusive. 3. They call me "irascible." Not sure if I've met either of the authors in person, I wonder how they formed that opinion and why they feel the need to label people like that. 

In another, related article they interview the creator of Finger, who says the ideas of blogging originated in bulletin boards. 

In any case, with all due respect, I think the CNet article misses something important as they make light of my claim to having bootstrapped blogging. The first blogs were inspired by this blog, in fact many of them, including Barger's Robot Wisdom, used my software. If you go to BlogTree, a site that asks bloggers to say which sites inspired them, you'll see how many self-declare as originating from the Scripting News community. How you summarize that effect is up to you, I call it a bootstrap.  

I was trying to disperse the community that developed around this blog, from the beginnig. The goal being to inspire other people to do the same as I was doing. Jason Kottke once called me the Johnny Appleseed of blogging, and that's something I'm happy with. That was my intention. 

To people who say the ideas were obvious, I don't think they were. I tried to convince many, including leading VCs and tech companies, to help bootstrap blogging, but I was left to do it myself.