GOOD NEWS: JORN BARGER IS BACK
JORN BARGER is back in the building. After disappearing from the web over a year ago, the man who coined the term 'weblog' has returned as quietly as he left. Part of the essential daily reading of this journal among many, it was the sort of place to go if you wanted, for example, to learn (as in today's lead link) "40 is the only number whose letters are in alphabetical order." Clink a glass. He's back.
WIKIPEDIA - Jorn Barger (born 1953 in Yellow Springs, Ohio) is a United States writer, best known on the Internet as editor of Robot Wisdom, an influential early weblog. He coined the term "weblog" to describe the process of "logging the web" as he surfed. . . Barger is an expert on James Joyce and artificial intelligence. At one time he worked at Northwestern University's Institute for the Learning Sciences under the influential Roger Schank, eventually departing over philosophical differences.
An active participant in Usenet during the 1990s, he wrote early FAQs on ASCII art, Kate Bush, Thomas Pynchon, and James Joyce. In 1994 he formulated an Inverse Law of Usenet Bandwidth: "The more interesting your life becomes, the less you post... and vice versa."
Previously a long-time resident of the Rogers Park neighborhood in Chicago, Barger was living in Socorro, New Mexico as of late 2003. An outpouring of concern and speculation occurred in early 2004 because he had not been seen online for some months, but he had been known to take unexplained absences from the Internet in the past, and this turned out to indeed be the case; Robot Wisdom returned February 2005.
JORN BARGER, SEPTEMBER 1999 - A weblog (sometimes called a blog or a newspage or a filter) is a webpage where a weblogger (sometimes called a blogger, or a pre-surfer) 'logs' all the other webpages she finds interesting. The format is normally to add the newest entry at the top of the page, so that repeat visitors can catch up by simply reading down the page until they reach a link they saw on their last visit.
(This causes some minor, unavoidable confusions when the logger comments on an earlier link that the visitor hasn't reached yet.)