In November of that year, he sent that list to Cameron Barrett. Jesse James Garrett, editor of Infosift, began compiling a list of “other sites like his” as he found them in his travels around the web. In 1998 there were just a handful of sites of the type that are now identified as weblogs (so named by Jorn Barger in December 1997). The conflict between access structure and writing space appears under a number of different names in the writings of Rebecca Blood, the weblog community’s foremost apologist and chronicler, who describes it as an antagonism that split the community at its core: those who, like herself, believed that weblogs performed a “valuable filtering function” and aimed to be “dependable sources of links to reliably interesting material” :54 increasingly found themselves opposed to – and outnumbered by – an “influx of short-form diarists” who wouldn’t link but posted “entry after entry of blurts and personal observations,” :149 thus “inverting the primary values of the community.” :154īlood counterpoints her account of a community riven by conflict with an untroubled founding narrative, first offered by her husband Jesse James Garrett, which holds that the weblog community coalesced out of virtually nothing in early 1999: The blogosphere had an immediate historical predecessor, the weblog community, in which the weblog held a rhetorically ambiguous and contested status between a writing space that answered an author’s expressive needs and an access structure through which an editor was meant to recommend and annotate high-quality URLs. Today’s blogosphere with its wealth of discursive practices is, in Jay Bolter’s phrase, a writing space.
Working from the online archival record, this paper aims to reconstruct the emergence at Jorn Barger’s initiative of the weblog community from a predecessor known as the NewsPage Network.
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