You’re reaching hard, man.

*Usenet*, I could see. It borders on the delusionary to count blogs in that scene.

Close enough?

He was the guy that first put all this stuff on the map. Remember Drudge’s speech to the Washington Press Corp in the summer of ‘99?

“The Internet is going to save the news business. I envision a future where there’ll be 300 million reporters, where anyone from anywhere can report for any reason. It’s freedom of participation absolutely realized.”

http://www.libertyroundtable.org/library/essay.drudge.html

I remember Drudge’s ‘99 speech. I also remember writing this —

http://www.no-treason.com/Beck/b1.php

– more than eighteen months earlier for J. Orlin Grabbe’s website, and the thing had been clear to me a lot longer than that.

<blockquote>“In the meanwhile, little people of ordinary (i.e.: natural) rational faculty are finding their own channels to and from each other. The practical effect of this is that the concept of a “peer” is tested every day, by and among them. If one says something that makes sense, one is granted a natural authority more powerful than any ever assumed by election, or sneaked past the invisible market hand which packages hand-waving assumptions a few pages apart from the latest stock quotes.

This is the Internet: where peers make the sensible grade with every post, and cranks are great fun. “</blockquote>So; we’re stretching out the definition of “blogging” to something like “anyone reporting from anywhere for any reason”. This was going on ten years ago, anyway. Drudge never did anything that very many other people weren’t doing before him, if we’re going to qualify the thing like that.

The thing I always hate to see is people writing history of this sort of thing as if it all sprang-forth fully-blown from an example like Drudge. It’s simply not true, and if we’re going to call him a “blogger” — not from the form of his work (i.e.; on the Web instead of Usenet), but from its essence as “reporting from anywhere, anytime” — then it’s not fair to a lot of people who devoted themselves to excellent work back when the Web stars of today weren’t even an echo in anyone’s modem.

(BTW — your preview function is spitting and hissing at me, so I’m not sure what this is going to look like after I send it. Here we go.)