Jimbo.Info

What the hell do they mean "alleged former hustler"? What do they need to be sure, a never forthcoming confession? Journalism has sunk to new lows I see.

Well it's Jeff Gannon/Gukert. What did you expect? He's not even a journalist!

I'm not familiar with the origins of blogging (I'm a newbie), but I just did a blog about the birth and death of blogs. http://www.allabouttrey.blogspot.com/

My opinion of the "gay media" is the same for all so called "information media" (which is a very low opinion)

And your are correct Jimbo, the Blog/LJ originated and evolved from the primordial ooze of the geek realm. It is the geek that humanity should be thanking and praising :-)

Gannon (the villain from Zelda, too) is like a male version of Washingtonienne. Remember her? Jessica Cutler, the slut who took money for sex from around a dozen high-level Bush staffers while working for a Republican Senator from Ohio? Her book is coming out soon, by the way.

I guess my point is, the Republicans have a long and storied tradition of "collaborating" with hookers. The Democrats prey on interns -- an acceptable enough sport -- but the right-wingers actually pay for their services. Shame!

No really, if you can't laugh about how absolutely foolish and silly Washington is, then you're gonna be more and more unhappy.

And blogging got its start well before blogger was around -- look at Slashdot, or other tech blogs (you're right about that part). Software like blogger came about AFTER people saw blogging could be a mass phenomenon, since there were "old" blogs in 1998.

Gad, yes. Blogging, web-log, personal journal, update page, maybe journalism, most of the time not. The closest thing I can say most blogs I read resemble anything meeting my image of journalism is the opinion page of the paper. I still have this grand belief that real journalism never, ever, never-ever, uses the first person singular. Blogs are almost always all about the "I". I did this. I didn't do this. I saw this. Blah-blah (1000x).
My own blog is not journalism. I've never been to J school. Don't want to be Lois Lane (besides she keeps doing stupid crap like meeting up with Lex Luthor alone. Bitch call for back up!). My blog is just me, spouting off my opinion. It is my truth, in my little world, not unbiased journalism.

That is pretty exciting about the Ivory-billed woodpecker. Now if they could find some passenger pigeons.

hehe...i had a good hunch you would be mentioning the 'ol Ivory Bill today. I would love to see one, but it sounds like they live in very inhumane territory.

this is not a slam towards you at all, jimbo, but who the fuck reads the advocate these days?

it's a completely useless, $4.95 PR pamphlet with no new info anyone with internet access didn't have two weeks before publication.

i finally gave up on it after the 3.456th "More Straight Celebs Who Adore Us!" cover story.

Actually I think the first online journals started around 1995 and were all hand-coded affairs. I quasi-started one in 97 and by that time planetsoma.com (now otherstream.com) had been around for quite a while. All the content management software (and the dumb sounding word "blog") also came quite a bit later.

Jimbo:

Since you know so much about the origins of blogs, you really should be documenting it. And I mean now. I know fuck-all about who the pioneers are, and only by getting involved did I get a feel for who the major players were.

I think you should collaborate with all these "old-timers" and get this all down. Perhaps you could even come up with some sort of primer or a tentative history of queer blogging. Best to strike while the iron is hot than wait for some some electronic archeologist to have to work twice as hard to get the wrong answer.

Just an idea.

Online journals predated weblogs by some years, and to some extent still form a separate community. Their form was different from blogs - they tended to put one entry per page, as if a paper diary had been transplanted to the Web.

The earliest weblogs go back to 1997. They were either handcoded, or their creators created programs to create them. Some people used userland's frontier to update their blogs. the weblog community formed in early 1999 http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html.
It was that community that inspired people to make blogging software - blogs existed before there was software to make them.

The first wave of blog updating software was released in summer 1999. (Livejournal predates that software, but they were - and mostly still are - something of a community unto themselves.)

As for the origins of the *gay* blogging community, I can't be of much help.

The first gay blogger was surely Brad L Graham http://www.bradlands.com/weblog/index.shtml - he was part of that original weblog community, and wrote one of the first essays on the form http://www.bradlands.com/colophon/whyiweblog.shtml. Another well-known blogger in the early days was Joe Clark - on fact, he was somewhat notorious for writing the first essay about the blogging A-list. http://www.fawny.org/decon-blog.html