Ten Years of Scripting.com
Today marks the tenth anniversary of Dave Winer's pioneering weblog, scripting.com .
Winer writes of the site that
It helped bootstrap the blogging world. The earliest weblogs were patterned after this site. The software [Manilla/Radio Userlanjd] that was used to build those blogs came from Scripting News.
Scripting News was crucially important in the development of blogs because it harnessed enthusiasm and a quirky individuality of voice to a serious purpose. Other early protoblogs tended to be serious but voiceless, or expressive and unserious. Indeed, it was the transgressive frivolity of Justin Hall's personal diary that made links.net so compelling: there was no percentage for Justin in telling us all this — you knew (even if he didn't) that his girlfriends were going to be weirded out and there would be hell to pay — but the candor and good writing and the impending train wrecks were strangely appealing.
But Winer was something else: a serious and important developer, someone with a seat at the software industry's top table, devoting very serious resources to spreading information through this new medium.
Happy Birthday.