Look a little closer

Saturday, April 07, 2007 by Dave Winer.

Some people are saying that Day 1 of Scripting News was nothing more than a collection of links to sites I had visited. I have a couple of responses to that. 

1. That's what weblogs were in the early days, it's only later that the the title-link-description model became the norm. Wes Felter, an early blogger, laments that change, and says it has more to do with the software than the way people blog. I agree, in fact that's why sites like del.icio.us came along to reinvent what blogs were in the first place!  

2. Look a little closer, the last link on the page is to a DaveNet piece, which was more like what you'd think of as a blog post today. For people who weren't around back then, DaveNet was a series of essays I started in 1994, they were shipped via email, published on the web, and often quoted in the press (thanks!). I humbly put the link at the bottom of the page in the beginning because I didn't want to seem egotistic, but later I got over it, and put it at the top, where it belonged. Eventually I stopped writing DaveNets because mail became clogged with spam, and I wanted to encourage people do use the web more. Nowadays, Scripting News is like DaveNet, so things have come pretty much full circle in the almost thirteen years since all this michegas started.