So do we count the caveman as the first blogger? Were her drawings on a cave wall a way to express herself or an attempt to invoke magic in the hunt or a diary/instruction manual for future generations to read? Perhaps all of these things.
I was trying to think who was the first "blogger" - shouldn't we just say diarist because the medium isn't very important - that we have some knowledge of. I think it's got to pre-date the invention of paper/papyrus (did this happen simultaneously in China and Sumeria?). The first diarists probably wrote on stone in a place protected from the weather.
Famous diarists that come to mind would be James Boswell, and Samuel Pepys. Sometimes I think that my education has been stunted that more names don't come to mind immediately.
I don't suppose that one can count Yamamoto Tsunetomo or Miyamoto Musashi amongst the ranks of diarists though it would be tempting. I think they wrote more for posterity and to enrich future generations rather than chronicling their times and experiences in a daily manner.
My first experiences were on paper (yes, pre-dating the Web). My first writing for the Web was my diary (complete with pictures!) of my first trip back to Europe in 1993. My second trip back to Europe (more of an attempt to live there for a protracted period) is less-well diarized. Incomplete, oddly enough, because when I first arrived I had no television in my apartment and so I spent a good deal of time writing of my adventure. (Does this mean that the television foreshadows a reduction in creativity?) This time, it's a more contemporaneous record as I had access to a laptop, a digital camera, and an Internet connection during my trip to France. Unfortunately, it's a record of really only the first month and I don't think it'll ever progress beyond that (though I have quite a few pictures I can add beyond that first month).
During my first visit, I was working at Apple (Taligent) documenting the development of the kernel of Pink (Apple's abortive attempt to develop the precursor to OS X). So I wrote in a proper diary and took pictures on film (gasp!) and scanned them all on my return to create my first attempt at a blog.
I suppose I could lay claim to being one of the first bloggers as I started writing on the Web in late 1993, early 1994. Of course, there has been a huge gap since :>.
Posted by artandscience at December 12, 2003 12:07 PM