Of Unknown Origin
Gaby wonders who influenced bloggers to blog, and the reality is that I don’t know. It would be nice to know, given that 2023 is the year I try to get as much of my blogging from the past two decades as possible back online. I’ve been sitting here using the Wayback Machine to try to figure some stuff out, and I notice now that I was doing something in 1998 that arguably might have been blogging but it doesn’t appear actually to have gotten archived, and it’s not clear from the reference I found whether it was blogging, proto-blogging, or just some sort of intermittent, collected set of updates about things. That said, as part of that same project I was definitely blogging by early 2000. Whatever this 1998 thing was, I’d likely have some sort of archive of my own but it almost certainly would be either on an old OpenBSD drive I can’t mount anywhere, or even on an old Apple laptop whose drive I think I still have but is dead. I’m assuming that my earliest blogging might have some mention of how I found blogging, but without access to this earliest stuff I can’t verify that assumption. So the matter of who influenced me to blog remains a mystery.