While casually dismissing the idea that there were pre-web blogs “in the form of people’s home directories”, I did wonder about possible proto-blogging in those days. Hans Gerwitz suggested use of the .plan files accessible via the finger protocol “as a sort of microblog”, and now I wonder if indeed that’s what Jared Pereira was on about to begin with. Even the linked Wikipedia entry says, “Often this file (maintained by the user) contains … useful information about the user’s current activities, similar to micro-blogging.” Just because I don’t remember seeing it used this way (mostly I remember .plan files used similarly to .sig files in email) doesn’t mean it wasn’t.