Welcome to Year Eleven!

Sunday, April 01, 2007 by Dave Winer.

On this day, ten years ago, a weblog named Scripting News appeared for the first time at this address.  

Today, it is the longest continuing running weblog on the Internet. 

This site played a big role in several important trends.  

1. It helped bootstrap the blogging world. The earliest weblogs were patterened after this site. The software that was used to build many of those blogs came from Scripting News.  

2. It was the focal point for the communities that created RSS and podcasting. 

3. Many of the political and social innovations that sprang from the blogging world got their start in the Scripting News community. 

Earlier today SN more or less reflects what the site looked like on its first day, 4/1/97. It was an approximation, in some cases the original sites are gone, but archives are available at archive.org. In those places I've linked to the archive.org versions. In other cases there's no backup at archive.org -- those links are broken. But there is a lot of interesting stuff hanging off this page. If you're interested in the roots of blogging, you'll find a lot of treasure here. It may be worth an hour or more exploration on a Sunday afternoon.  

I've archived the 1997 version of the home page. 

We'll have a downloadable archive of the first ten years of Scripting News here shortly.