Derek Lowe’s doing a lunch thing at the ACS meeting, and in passing mentions the age of his blog:
As the longest-standing chemistry blogger (perhaps the longest standing science blogger, for all I know), I’m glad to have a chance to speak.
I was just telling a reader by e-mail that when I started this site in 2002, that I wasn’t sure how much I’d find to write about. But (for better or worse) the material just keeps on coming. . .
Derek’s blog pre-dates this one by a few months– I specifically cite him in the very first Uncertain Principles post, so he’s got me beat. I wonder, though, if there are any science blogs that have been going for longer. I suppose it hinges on the definition of a “blog”– John Baez’s This Week’s Finds started in 1993, and Bob Park’s What’s New pre-dates the Web, having started in 1987 (or at least that’s the first year for which they have an online archive). You could probably make a reasonable argument that neither of those was really a blog by the modern definition.
So what is the oldest science blog in existence?
Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy (archive site) predates blogging platforms; it started as a manually updated “home page.” I’m not sure when it first went online, but here’s a post from February, 1999.
There are certainly precedents, but AFAIK Phil’s the only one to transfer seamlessly from homepage to blogging without a break.
Well now, you asked two questions there: Who has the oldest science blog and who is the oldest science blogger. Two different things entirely
You mean to suggest there’s life before blogging? Surely you jest, mr Vitelli.
I can’t answer the question, but I think you’d better, um, “set boundary conditions”* to exclude listservs, Usenet, services like GENIE, AOL and Compuserve, and bulletin board systems â if that’s what you want to do.
* Ref: Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves â “No one says ‘set boundary conditions’ unless they’re a physicist.”
I am not a physicist.
It can’t be hard to determine what the first, oldest blog … web log … (of any kind) is.
Then, you have to decide is “computer science” is a “science” because if it is, expect early blogs to be of that sort.
Then you have to decide what longevity is. Phil’s early site may or may not be continuous with his later sites, for instance (I’m not saying it is not, but by what definition?)
According to Wikipedia, Dave Winer started blogging computing stuff in 1994 (Scripting News). Computer stuff? yes. Computer science? Maybe. Something that most people would identify as a science blog? no. But, lots of people have rather narrow views of what a science blog (or what science) is.
i started blogging the same month as you i think, april 2002. there were a few others out there besides derek lowe, but all are defunct that i know of.
In the 90s a lot of people called them “online journals.” I remember reading online journals back then. And yeah, you had to manually edit the HTML, which is why automated services were developed. I don’t think I heard the word “blog” until after Blogger came out (in 2000).
As for a science-specific updater, who knows. It’s probably someone you’ve never heard of.
I just read comment #5 and I think he brings up a good point. Modern blogging evolved from other kinds of periodic updating on various platforms, including the web. Some people simply updated their home pages regularly. At some point they called this “online journaling” or “web logging.” There may not be a clear point when “blogging” began, just as you can’t point to the very first human, but there were lots of similar activities in the 1990s.
I started my notebooks (URL linked to my name) in the fall of 1994. (Dates on entries are dates of last modification, not creation.) The format’s a bit different from the modern notion of a weblog, however.