Tedium - The Pioneers ✍️

Today in Tedium: I think the thing I’ve realized recently is that it’s been so long since we’ve had a fully open online culture that we haven’t really talked about how that is different from what came before, and why it’s something people might want. The reaction when the fediverse, particularly Mastodon, saw a surge in attention was telling. It’s not just the commentary about the platform being confusing or the concern that having to make choices about your digital identity was hard. We have been centralized so long that many of us don’t even remember how it feels to experience online creation on an open plot of land. So with that in mind, given the fresh attention being given to blogging at the moment, I wanted to offer a quick guide to some key early voices in blogging that might give you an idea of what exactly you’re getting into if you decide to start a blog in 2023. This is going to be a listicle style, and I’m going to focus more on historic relevance than fame or authority. For at least some of these, I am specifically highlighting voices you may or may not know so that you dive in a little further. (Folks like Anil Dash and Jason Kottke and John Gruber are hopefully obvious.) The numbers mean nothing in terms of order, other than a rough chronological order. So, with that in mind, today’s Tedium talks blogging pioneers. — Ernie @ Tedium

2. Justin Hall

Blogging genres: Personal website, lifestreaming

Known for: Being one of the original bloggers

Site: Links from the Underground (Links.net)

If there is something that can be taken away from Pournelle’s “first writer on the internet” stance, it’s that he started in the pre-internet days, sharing on outlets like BIX, only later moving to the World Wide Web.

Justin Hall, on the other hand, started writing in a blog-style format on the web as a college student way back in January of 1994, with arguably one of the best domains on the internet—links.net. He is considered widely to be the first-ever blogger, with a website that feels utterly retro in nature and in its 1994 form reflecting a blast from the past in the best way possible.

Hall was notable for laying everything out on the line in its rawest form, basically using this home base as a place to tell his life story.

Hall, who now works at an online marijuana dispensary startup, went to the trouble of doing a 40-minute documentary on his life as the first blogger seven and a half years ago and it has less than 15,000 views on YouTube. A goddamn shame.

Pop&Politics, as it appeared in 1996.

4. Farai Chideya

Blogging genres: News, politics, culture

Known for: Becoming one of the first Black bloggers

Website: Farai.com

In 1999, the early online entrepreneur Omar Wasow, a former BBS operator, found much success by creating BlackPlanet.com, a social media network for Black audiences that was one of the first of its kind. A few years prior, Wasow (who is now a high-profile academic at UC Berkley) helped a Harvard graduate and freelance journalist build a presence on the internet for her political and pop-culture writing—and as a result helped create one of the first genre-defining blogs.

That website, called Pop&Politics, was so early to blogging that it referred to the blog as “digitally syndicated columns.”

Farai Chideya was an early digital culture native, something she was exposed to while at Harvard, as Charlton McIlwain’s 2019 book Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, From the Afronet to Black Lives Matter makes clear. She joined the WELL at a time when the community was almost entirely white, and was very active in some of the earliest Black-focused online communities, such as AOL’s NetNoir community. But from a blogging point of view, Pop&Politics (which later evolved into a podcast) was perhaps the most groundbreaking part of Chideya’s online presence.

“I saw Pop&Politics as a place where I could be free and say what I wanted without editorial oversight, which again is good and bad,” she recalled in the book. “With solo blogging … most successful bloggers, even ones who are solo bloggers, have someone editing them. I enjoyed the freedom. Newsweek had rules about how much voice you could put into a particular piece.”

Chideya, who used Pop&Politics and NetNoir to successfully launch a book, was also notable in another sense, as her work made her one of the first bloggers to regularly appear on television as a political pundit, something that Wasow also notably did.

Coudal Partners, as it appears today. The site’s design has largely maintained this shape through much of its history.

6. Jim Coudal

Blogging genres: Design, marketing, business

Known for: Coudal Partners, Field Notes, launching a first successful ad network for bloggers

Website: Coudal Partners

In recent years, the business world has evolved into one that uses blogging as a lingua franca of sorts, a genre of creation called content marketing. Jim Coudal, with his ad agency Coudal Partners, was one of the very first to embrace this general concept in the late 1990s, launching a site that had interesting links and stories throughout.

It put enough of an interest on Coudal’s business that it might have set the stage for the company’s second act, a popular line of notebooks called Field Notes.

If that was all he did, that would be impressive, but Coudal also played a key role in supporting the early blogosphere through his ad network The Deck, an ad network driven by influential bloggers that tried something all too rare—it tried to build a market for advertising without tracking or in-your-face ads, and found success doing so. The ad network’s 2017 shutdown) was seen as a sign that the blogosphere was declining.

Little Green Footballs, as it appears today.

8. Charles Johnson

Blogging genres: Politics

Known for: Being a guitarist, running Little Green Footballs

Website: Little Green Footballs

We can’t talk about the early blogosphere without talking about the rise of political blogs, with sites like Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, and Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish helping to shape the discourse along the political spectrum.

Perhaps the best example of the shift in influence that political blogs had on the discourse came from Charles Johnson, a onetime jazz guitarist whose Little Green Footballs emerged in 2001, in many ways reflects the shape of the blogosphere. Johnson started his site with a relatively apolitical bent, which shifted dramatically after the attacks on September 11, 2001. Johnson helped to use his platform to support the War on Terror, and played an important role in exposing Memogate—the controversy around George W. Bush’s service records that led to Dan Rather’s ouster from CBS News—all because he was observant about how text is portrayed in Microsoft Word.

What’s fascinating about Johnson is that around 2009 or so, he dramatically changed sides and took a more left-leaning stance, denouncing many of his more aggressive anti-Islam stances in the process. These kinds of political shifts are not particularly common—and if they happen, it’s often more gradual than what Johnson did.

In many ways the political blogosphere has largely shifted to social media and Substack, but Johnson’s blog is still operating more than two decades in.

The first image to appear on Soup, way back in 2007.

10. Anthony DeRosa

Blogging genres: Tumblogging, social media reporting

Known for: Working at a number of major media outlets, running the Soup Tumblr

Website: Soup on Tumblr

Tumblr first went online in the winter of 2007, the work of a software consultancy owned by a then-20-year-old David Karp (and developed closely with the help of Marco Arment, an app developer who is also a popular podcaster). In the fall of 2007, An unsuspecting thirtysomething Mets fan named Anthony DeRosa launched a site called Soup on Tumblr with a camera phone photo of a MacBook showing Soup starting Soup while The Colbert Report was playing in the background.

Not that he could have known it at the time but this was the perfect opening bow for DeRosa as a public-facing blogger—less than a decade later, he would find himself working at a version of The Daily Show that was finding its footing after Colbert and later Jon Stewart had left the late-night franchise. He had evolved into a successful digital journalist thanks in no small part to the site he originated on that fall evening.

Anthony’s gift to the medium of blogging was the role of curation—a newshound’s eye that focused less on having a lot to say and more on bringing together a lot of interesting ideas and angles in a single place. It was a skill that grew increasingly important over time, and one that particularly found value on Tumblr and later Twitter. Tumblr, in many ways, was a bridge between blogging and social media, and DeRosa was one of the first people to cross it.

While DeRosa, like a number of vintage Tumblr users (myself included), eventually moved away from the medium, his success in media shows how blogging came to shape the media significantly in the 2010s. During that period, DeRosa spent time at Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Show, and at the media startup Circa.