What was the first science blog?

The first science blog? Trying to determine that is a fool’s errand, says science blogging godfather Bora Zivkovic, in a nearly 7,000-word blog post reviewing the origins and evolution of science blogs. Zivkovic, known more properly as the editor of the Scientific American blog network, was present at the creation, beginning in the 1990s, before blogs existed. (At that time, comments were posted on something called Usenet, a kind of Internet bulletin board.) Zivkovic explains where it all began:

Pin-pointing the exact date when the first science blog started is a fool’s errand. Blogs did not spring out of nowhere overnight. The first bloggers were software developers who experimented with existing software, then made some new software, fiddling around until they gradually hit on the format that we now think of a ‘blog’ today.

If Zivkovic couldn't track down the first blogger (and he's not an anthropologist), let's give him a break, because there is so much that he does know. Some of the first science blogs, for example, arose in response to anti-science claims, countering such things as creationism and climate denial. If you weren't blogging in the mid-2000s, when all the science bloggers knew and blogrolled each other, you've already missed the golden age. You had already missed Hemingway in Paris, and now you've missed Zivkovic in, well, wherever the heck he was back then. With blogs, who knows?

He talks about blog carnivals, which were new to me. And he talks about improvements that allowed bloggers to post video and other such fancy stuff, and by that time he's getting up to where I know the history myself. (Whew.) Much of what he talks about is the result of things he's done himself, through his ScienceOnline organization, which holds annual conferences for science bloggers and produces OpenLaboratory, a crowd-sourced anthology of some of the finest writing on science blogs.

This might be a little more than you want to know, but I suggest it's worth pushing through. As George Santayana said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to reblog it. I think that was it.

-Paul Raeburn