I was introduced to a new word a few weeks ago. It was in an article in Exclaim! several weeks back. I'd heard the word previously, but hadn't understood the meaning. The word was "blog".

Huh? Ever been in a conversation with somebody, and they said a word you'd never heard before? Probably. You may have paused to ask for a clarification, or you may have tried to infer the meaning using the rest of the sentence. Well, I'd received emails from people commenting on (what they called) my "blog", and I took the latter action. Except obviously I hadn't considered the meaning of the word. I knew what documents were being referred to, but I essentially ignored the word itself. I even scanned through the Exclaim! issue in question without noticing what the article was actually about.

I checked the web pages of the bloggers mentioned in the Exclaim! piece, and continued following a trail of links from those pages. Incredible -- here were zillions of other writers updating their web pages with regular thoughts, brainstorms, and rants. Just like me. Is this what Columbus felt like? OK, bad example, I'm not out to steal people's web space and unwittingly infect them with my dastardly European diseases. Is this what it was like to work behind the Iron Curtain? Damn, that's another bad example, my own ignorance has kept me in the dark all this time. No greater power ever cut me off from half of the world. Anyhow, I was QUITE surprised. More so, I assumed a coat of restrained arrogance as I scrolled through the archives of the blogosphere and couldn't find anyone who'd been, uh, blogging for as long as I have. Could it be ... was I the original blogger? A tech pioneer? Holy crap, would THAT be ironic -- I don't even own a computer! I've always been technologically behind the times. I didn't get a CD player until 1994! An email address until 1996!! A cell phone until 2001!!! More particularly, I didn't even feel a person NEEDED those things until I got them, became utterly dependent on them, and understood that they weren't just luxury items and technotoys for showing off to friends. And yet inexplicably, me, a class A upholder of technological stasis, I'd pioneered the next wave of online journalism ...

Clearly it was time to do a bit more research, so I googled "blog history" and was pointed toward Rebecca Blood's article , written in September 2000. The first blogs were primarily web filters. The blogger (in the course of his or her normal web surfing activities) would compile (and regularly update) a list of links to the web sites they found most interesting, and include a commentary along with each link. In effect, Joe Websurfer didn't need to search the entire web, because like-minded bloggers had already pre-surfed the web and identified the best content. For instance, two of my last three diary entries follow this format (as does this entry).

With the release of software such as Pita and Blogger (summer 1999), there was a shift away from the web-links format toward an online journal format. This also necessitated a shift in terminology. A blog (circa early 1999) meant a series of filter-based entries as I described it. Now, a blog is a web page containing regularly posted diary entries. These days, a blog has no specific purpose, filtering or otherwise. The format and content are completely open-ended. They develop according to the discretion and imagination of the author.

As for my pedigree as a pioneer ... Blood states there were 23 blogs at the start of 1999 and many thousands when her article was written. I'm obviously somewhere in line between the few and the few thousand. But as a music-only blogger, I'm fairly certain that I can take my spot far closer to the few than the few thousand.

Does it matter? Who's on first? Who cares? Well, I do. In truth, I don't care too much about being first or 50th or 500050th. What matters more to me is thinking up -- independently -- a cool idea for my web page and coming to understand that lots of others think it's a cool idea as well. Maybe I am bragging a little bit because I came up with the idea all by my lonesome, but you can only brag so much about being ignorant to what other people have already thought up. If I'd known about blogs in the late fall of 1999 then I could have concocted a title less awkward and adolescent than "Diary of Musical Thoughts". It's a title I never liked but couldn't think of anything better.

Unfortunately, scientists nearly always can't settle for the "independent discovery" argument. Being first is the main thing. But for a guy who had a good idea while working outside his field of expertise, I did all right.