Scripting News’ 10th birthday inspires walk down memory lane

Dave Winer posts today about the first days of his “Scripting News” blog, which dates back 10 years to April 1, 1997. He even provides a link to an archived version of his first Scripting News post here.

I got a kick out of checking out Dave’s archived site. It brings back lots of memories–not that I recall ever reading Scripting News back in ’97, but rather it got my brother (Layne), sister (Lora) and I recalling some of the early days of WhatIsNew.com–the oldest of the blogs that Lora and Layne started. Lora is the primary writer for WhatIsNew today and Layne handles much of the administration. Early on Layne did quite a bit of the posting. Lora provides a screenshot showing what an early version of WhatIsNew used to look like back in 1996. The oldest posting we could find on archive.org for WhatIsNew itself is this one in 1998.

A couple things struck us as we walked back in our minds trying to recall when WhatIsNew got underway. In terms of dates, our memories are a bit hazy. No matter. WhatIsNew grew organically rather than launching on a specific date. We do know from checking the online registries that the WhatIsNew domain name was created on Dec 11, 1997, but the postings really started before that. The postings were part of the customer support Lora and Layne provided to customers of an online computer store they ran back then. The original intent was not to create a blog, but rather as a way to more efficiently spread the word about product changes and industry news as well as share little tidbits about themselves, and more frequently, their dogs. Yep, the dogs (Gracie and Albert) got lots of coverage.

Plain and simple WhatIsNew was created as a way to more efficiently broadcast daily updates. You had a choice, keep the posts up to date on WhatIsNew or go over each item again and again with people calling in on the phones. Quickly the WhatIsNew postings grew in popularity and it wasn’t long before the ISP was complaining of the bandwidth. That’s when the separate domain was created.

The writings weren’t just about being more efficient though. It didn’t take long before they realized that the daily postings drove traffic. The more they posted, the more people read. The same is true with blogs today. The postings also provided an archived discussion. Interestingly, there wasn’t much discusison about the power of links or getting into search engines. That came later. Today these are probably the two most valuable pieces of a blog–maybe due in large part to the way Google works and its value in today’s market.

Since its early days, WhatIsNew has gone through several transitions. Early on there was lots of talk about desktops, processors, and memory. Now WhatIsNew focuses mainly on news and thoughts around the mobile and Tablet PC market–reflecting Lora’s personal interest in this area. Who knows where it might be in another 10 years. Maybe if our nieces are writing for WhatIsNew it’ll be more about UMPCs–or whatever handheld computers might be called at the time. We’ll have to see.

Anyway, thanks Dave for the inspiration to walk down memory lane!