First Posts!

I recently wrote about my first post to this site. I got to wondering–what do other people’s first posts look like? I went and did a little survey. I started with a bunch of super-popular blogs, and also checked out some of the blogs I’ve been reading for a long time.

In many cases I’ve only been able to guess at a first post (Weblogs Inc. blogs are particularly tricky, for example). If anybody has info on a particular first post that’s incorrect, leave a comment.

For each blog, I’m including the name of the blog or blogger, a link to their current site, the date, and a link and excerpt from the first post (sometimes using the Wayback Machine). Here they are, in no particular order but numbered for ease of reading:

From the Technorati 100, More or Less

1. Dave Winer – February 15, 1996 – 8:13AM: The Mailing List is on the air.
2. Robert Scoble – February 14, 2001 (as early as I could find) – Someday I’d like to be as good as Paul Andrews.
3. Gizmodo – April 26, 2002 – Test – Ignore Me Jgjkghjvhbcnvbcmnvbmvnbcvmnbk jhgkjhtuy46tdjhfggscvdhnbgddfjdhdjfnfuy563yg
4. Daily Kos – May 26, 2002 – I am progressive. I am liberal. I make no apologies. I believe government has an obligation to create an even playing field for all of this country’s citizens and immigrants alike.
5. TechCrunch – June 11, 2005 – Technorati is Web 2.0 old school–one of the original (and best) real-time search engines.
6. Engadget – May 2, 2004 – Not that anyone seems to be demanding yet another Flash memory card format, but SanDisk just took the wraps off of T-Flash, which is meant to be used with cellphones.
7. Dooce – February 27 , 2001 – Today is the third day in a row that rain has pounded (relatively speaking, of course) my little part of Southern California. I didn’t move here to test whether or not I’ve successfully learned to cope with Seasonal Affect Disorder, or to merrily ponder the beauties and wonders of drip drip drop little raindrops. I came here for the fucking sunshine, and I want mine.
8. Lifehacker – January 31, 2005 – That’s what Lifehacker’s about: the endless possibilities of technology and how it can improve our lives. Lifehacker points out software, sites, tips and tricks that help you get things done, plain and simple.
9. Michelle Malkin – June 8, 2004 – Still working on putting together a blogroll and other de rigeur blogstuff. The kids are asleep and I’ll be tooling around. Let me know what you think.
10. Gawker – February 6, 2002 – DJIA NAS AOL HSX IRQ BSH TINA GWK
11. Instapundit – August 8, 2001 – Well, it looks like the Department of Justice is finally going after the music industry for antitrust violations.
12. Little Green Footballs – Feburary 7, 2001 – Still looking for alternatives to blogger, I’ve discovered Greymatter, a self-contained weblog system written in Perl. This is my first entry in the Greymatter weblog.
13. Topix.net – January 17, 2004 – LDY #>HELLO
    LDA #<HELLO
    JSR PRINT
    RTS
    HELLO ASC ‘Hello, World.’
    DFB $0
14. Kotaku – July 1, 2004 – As Gizmodo is to gadgets, so Kotaku is to computer games. Kotaku will provide hourly links and commentary for obsessive gamers — and explore the cultural ramifications interesting enough to attract a wider audience.
15. Power Line – May 25, 2002 – This is a new blog dedicated to current events and any topics that are of interest to me.
16. Zefrank – June 11, 2002 – hotdogboy – great short movies, slightly disturbing but very funny.
17. Metafilter – July 14, 1999 – Cat-Scan.com is one of the strangest sites I’ve seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why.
18. Go Fug Yourself – July 1, 2004 – In honor of the fact that, these days, fugly seems to be the new pretty, we’ve created a blog to honor all the visual atrocities of the world.
19. Scott Adams – October 24, 2005 – My blog is the only writing you’ll see from me that doesn’t first go through a professional editor. That means plenty of grammar and punctuation wrecks for you to enjoy. I blame the public education system.
20. Joel on Software – December 24, 1999 – I’m on sabbatical now. I left my last job, at Juno Online Services, last November. Since then I’ve been traveling, learning, and resting up for the next big thing.
21. Micropersuasion – April 18, 2004 – The goal of this blog is to track the phenomena of Micro Persuasion.
22. Andrew Sullivan – January 1, 2001 – No, Mickey, Rumsfeld is not gay.
23. Doc Searls – November 11, 1999 – My goal is to get you up and running smoothly, and then step by step to integrate design expertise into this site. Dave Winer.

Blogs I’ve Read for More Than, Say, Two Years

1. Richard Eriksson – November 8, 2001 – I just discovered Blogger the other day, and I think I will use it to document my randomly occurring random thoughts.
2. Tod Maffin – September 17, 2004 – Some people ask me what my favorite radio piece is… that’s hard to answer, it’s like asking me which breath is my favorite — I need all of them to live!
3. The Moxie Blog – May 24, 2004 – I plan on spending the next five days giving the back-story of our theater, our plans, our current situation, our lives, and this blog…which I’m currently writing while I should be busy at my real job.
4. Derek Miller – October 1, 2000 – I’ve just started using a new weblog service called Blogger, recommended on the Web page of my friend Alistair Calder, for news and updates.
5. Travis Smith – August 11, 1998 – A fond goodbye via e-mail.  I also try to get rid of some of my stuff so as not to have so much in storage.
6. Roland Tanglao – March 16, 2004 – Hello World. This is my new MovableType blog.
7. Boris Mann – November 29, 2002 – This site is now using Drupal. Not bad, lots of features, relatively easy to set up, relatively easy to administer (there are cryptic sections), etc. etc.
8. Briana Doyle – July 30, 2004 – Just in case you’re wondering … more site trouble, needs another rebuild. I’ll get to it as soon as I can. Argh. Trying to decide whether to try and recreate my old design or come up with something new…
9. Jeremy Wright – June 23, 2003 – Just looking for people’s feedback. I’ve done some interviews with rather big-time tech folk, and I was thinking it might be fun to get them in and interview them on something other than what they are famous for.
10. Chris Pirillo – January 1, 2002 – It’s high time I started my own blog. I launched Lockergnome‘s Bits & Bytes on Blogger, but found it missing personality. Technology is my life, but every once in a while I gotta use a word like ‘boobie’ or ‘poop.’
11. Heather – August 10, 2000 – okay… this is finally use-able. i just spent a little too much ‘work’ time getting the template set up and learning how to use this blogging thing. now that i have, i can finally write a little bit of an introductory entry.
12. Julie Leung – July 20, 2003 – Here begins my weblog and I feel like a baby beginning to crawl, taking my legs along for the ride, learning, slowly…here I go…..
13. Tom Murphy – March 25, 2002 – Welcome to PR Opinions. This blog is all about Public Relations, Marketing, the Internet and other pertinent osbservations.
14. Stephen Taylor – January 14, 2004 – This is a test of the formatting for my weblog. This all should come together in a nicely formatted weblog. I hope to have a daily discourse of developments within our party plus a critique of daily news stories from a conservative perspective.
15. Sarah Carey – December 17, 2002 – The hysteria in the Irish press continues over the case of Bronagh Livingstone the premature baby who died in Cavan General Hospital.
16. Norlinda – January 7, 2004 – You guys are my impetus for finally getting a blog of my own. I hope I don’t embarrass any of you.

Conclusions

None of note, really. They’re mostly random, dull, “hello world” or some combination of all three. Some people have just dived right in, which might be the right way to go?

Topix.net gets credit for the nerdiest. Daily Kos is the only that starts with a real mandate. Julie Leung’s is the most poetic, as she connects her daughter’s crawling to her own nascent blogging. Boris’s is pretty funny, given his current association with Drupal. I suspect I don’t actually have the first post by several people–Jeremy, Roland, Robert–so hopefully they come by to update me.

One other observation. Of the 40-odd blogs, only one of them was started in 2003. What’s with that? Was that the trough of disillusionment for blogging?

UPDATE: Robert says his early posts have gone away into the Internet ether, but notes that his earliest post was December 15, 2000.