How blogging really began

First Site Guide - The concept was simple, but novel. Jorn [Barger] created a page that linked to other posts and pages, some on Robot Wisdom, some elsewhere. Every time he posted something new, it would appear at the top of the page, and everything else would move down a little. By scrolling down, you moved back in time.

It was here Jorn set out to create a space of his own, and explain his interests to a wider world he hoped would understand and welcome them. And they did, for a time. He started posting in 1995 and continued to post for an entire decade. During that time, Robot Wisdom changed the way the world communicated.

The whole process of collecting interesting things from around the world and writing about them on the internet was a new idea, and so it needed a new name. Jorn decided to call it “logging the web”, which made Robot Wisdom, of course, the first web log. So it became Robot Wisdom Weblog, and the blogosphere was born on December, 17, 1997.

Robot Wisdom continued to benefit from Jorn’s diverse interests and his prolific nature. It was updated one or more times a day, and there was virtually no one who could not find somewhere their interests and Jorn’s overlapped, and so Robot Wisdom Weblog grew...

Whatever it was that brought people to his site, it worked. Robot Wisdom became extremely popular, and Jorn found himself something of an early web icon, a pioneer of this new idea. He collected links to interesting content. Anything—everything!—was fair game, as long as it was interesting. Jorn Barger found himself influential, part of a tiny cadre of internet trendsetters. It was in this capacity that he made his mark on history. Every day he rounded up the best content he could find, and posted it to the top of the feed.

The most important part of Robot Wisdom was that structure. That feed-by-date structure is at the core of WordPress, Blogger, Facebook, and Twitter; it was really how Myspace got started. Somehow, this man who had trouble fitting in laid the cornerstone of what would become social media. Sure, it was just a journal, really, but it was available to anyone with an internet connection. Jorn could talk about artificial intelligence, his somewhat difficult childhood, Kate Bush, or link to a news article, all in one place, all in one day. There was no need to fit in, because it was his place, and his alone. Anyone could do it, and lots of people did. More every year.

Jorn Barger helped it along with his undeniable and appealing enthusiasm for a plethora of subjects, but there’s anguish in many of his personal posts on Robot Wisdom. It is clear Jorn Barger sees—has always seen—himself as an outsider, a self-described “oddball”. An odd man who knew he was odd, but never quite how, or why. And perhaps that was what people saw in him, because there are few threads winding themselves through the human experience so common as the feeling that we are not entirely understood by everyone else. As always, though, the seeds of his exodus were planted.




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