The first occurrence of "weblog" on Scripting News
I keep the full contents of the weblog, going back to the beginning in a Frontier object database called z.root. Aside from a lot of scripts that form the archive website, there's a calendar table, that's broken down into years, then months, then days. So I wrote a script that loops over days, looks in the outline elements, and finds the first that has the term, and then stops.
It stopped on January 20, 1998, but as far as my eye could see, there was no use of the term. Until I did a view source and found that it appeared in the href attribute of the anchor tag pointing to Robot Wisdom. So, by inference, at least at that time, Barger was thinking of his site as a weblog.
But I wanted to find out more -- when did I first use the term?
For that you have to fast-forward more than a year after that first reference to a post about My.Netscape on February 10, 1999, and a post that foretold many years of angst-to-come about a coalesced standard format for weblog syndication. (Emphasis added.)
There are starting to be a bunch of weblogs, wouldn't it be interesting if we could agree on an XML format between us?
So that's it -- no proof that Barger coined the term, but no contradiction either.
# Posted by Dave Winer on 12/10/05; 1:27:55 PM - --