Blogging is 10 years old today

by Patrick Altoft on July 15, 2007 / 5 responses

Believe it or not July 14th marks the 10th birthday of the very first blog, according to the WSJ.

The very first weblog was run by a guy called Jorn Barger and was a collection of interesting things he found on the web. The site is still going at robotwisdom.com. Interestingly Barger doesn’t seem to have made the most of his blog and ended up homeless and broke by 2005. In 2007 he can be found on blogger asking for donations to cover his hosting fees.

From the WSJ article:

We are approaching a decade since the first blogger — regarded by many to be Jorn Barger — began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary. On Dec. 23, 1997, on his site, Robot Wisdom, Mr. Barger wrote: “I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis,” and the Oxford English Dictionary regards this as the primordial root of the word “weblog.”

It’s hard to describe how much I wish I started blogging in 1997. Maybe with a few years headstart some of us might have created our very own engadget.

I’ve only been blogging for around 18 months but before that I read quite a few blogs. How long have you been blogging?

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Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.