… and that’s 12 years of blogging
I know that there are several active, continuously-running blogs out there that are older than mine, but I don’t really know how many there are, or indeed, what the oldest one is. So, I went out looking for them.
There are two issues I encountered with this. Firstly, the definition of a blog in the late 90s was hazy, so there are some websites that don’t fit today’s standard format that may or may not be regarded as blogs (at the least, they are precursors to blogs). Secondly, what makes a blog “continuously running” and “active”? If there’s a hiatus of 3 years in the middle, it’s not really an unbroken run. Or if there is one post every three months, is the blog actually active?
My first port of call was Wikipedia’s Blog entry. Apparently Justin Hall started blogging in 1994, but has since stopped. Writer Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor is also held up to be the oldest active blog. It appears to be still active today, but the design is stuck in the 90s and it’s hard to tell from the archives when his first post was. Scripting News is still running and has comprehensive archives. I then recalled visiting longstanding sites like Robot Wisdom, Peterme.com and Everything But Gaming. Robot Wisdom stopped publishing in its original form, and became something else. Peterme.com is still active. It only has archives back to March 2003, but I’m sure that it is much older than that – at least 1998. Then there were gaming sites like Blue’s News which used to cover lots of Quake-related news. (I am surprised to see is still running – it has archives back to mid-1996.) A Google search turned up this article, which claims that a few ZDNet writers used to keep an online diary (ie, a blog). However, it’s difficult to verify given that the archives aren’t really available. In any event, those writers aren’t keeping that diary anymore.
So it turns out that it’s not as easy as I thought as it would be to identify what the oldest active blogs online are.
I started compiling a list, but I didn’t get very far. My totally arbitrary criteria for what qualified included: the post archives are still available somewhere (even on archive.org), it’s updated multiple times a month, it exists on the web (as opposed to a .plan file… after all, a blog is a weblog), and posts originate on the blog (and aren’t transferred in from some other medium like a paper diary or news articles published elsewhere first).
I am sure that this list is far from complete, so drop me a note if you know of any others:
- Chaos Manor, Jerry Pournelle (mid-90s?)
- Blue’s News (mid-1996)
- Scripting News, Dave Winer (April 1997)
- Expect Nothing (started at shlonglor.com, then Everything But Gaming), Geoff Fraizer (late 1997)
Have you been reading Hear Ye! for a long time? Post a comment and let me know how long!
1:14am 
Weren’t BAMF and GeekLife on your roll back in the day?
Been reading on and off since about Sydney Olympics.
Congratulations, Stu. I’ve been reading you since April ’99: http://udink.org/archives/1999/04/new_links_and_s.shtml
I’ll be coming up on 12 years sometime this year, though I’m not certain of the exact date because I lost some entries from the very beginning.
That is a long time…
Hey Dennis, I think we have one of the longest running link exchanges going :)
BAMF and GeekLife used to be on “the list” a long time ago yes, along with a bunch of others
congrads man. I have been reading for 11 years, and when i stumlbed across the sight I thought it had been around much longer!