April 8, 2002

  • Historical Precursors of  the Weblog


    Hand-passed Valentines.   The first genuine endeavor in mass graphical/verbal interactivity.  Give gobs out, get gobs back.  Exciting, but few ever did find true love that way.   Moreover, not electronic.


    Restroom Graffiti.  Offering both verbal and graphical variety in an encompassing environment, restroom stall graffiti often begged for interactivity.  Technologically-superior coating materials and effacing techniques, however, have rendered this art form nearly obsolete.


    Winky Dink and You.   TV’s first interactive show and a cartoon to boot! It played on CBS in the ‘50s.  To help Winky Dink, the hero, out of jams, kids were instructed to draw on the TV screen with the Winky Dink kit.  The kit, obtainable for fifty cents by mail,  was composed of a clear plastic sheet that would stick to the TV by static electricity and included a set of magic crayons.  If Winky Dink needed a ladder or a rope or a bridge, mysterious dots would appear on the screen, there would be a suitable pause, and most of the kids at home took the cue to connect the dots.  After the dots were dutifully connected, Winky Dink could continue with his high heroics—thanks, kids!  Of course, some kids lacked a Winky Dink kit and just drew on the TV screen while others would draw barriers and obstacles for Winky Dink, thus transforming him into a defiant superhero as he passed unfettered through them.


    Freenets.  Electronic bulletin board communities popular in the mid-80s.  Although DOS-based, you could dial-in to the service, login with a username and password, and even post on public kiosks.  The freenets featured community chat and expert areas where you could leave questions for a professional, say, an oncologist, and get answers posted in proximate time. 


    Homepage Guestbooks.  The true neanderthal precursor of the weblog.  Except it was always a separate applet tearing you away from the mainpage and thus erecting a barrier to immediacy.   Commenting on a blog is a lot like leaving a message in an electronic guestbook, except that the originating blogger’s most recent customized message replaces the “introduction message” of the guestbook.  If you can imagine a chronologically-linked series of guestbooks, the latest of which always “floats” to the top of the portal page of the author, then you just concocted a primitive weblog.


    What’s Next?  I’d love to be able to watch blogs stream at reading speed (customizable and intercessionary) down the screen.  These streaming blogs could consist of all the peeps you subscribe to and what they’ve written over the past day, or just a random input of community contributions, or precisely the Newly Updated list as it occurs (or a streaming sample thereof).  As you would read along, if you’d care to prop or comment, you’d only need to tap your mouse, or perhaps even just mouseover, to bring up a pop-up or a pop-aside comment box that would, of course, temporarily halt the stream.  Submit and let the stream continue.  Dip in again when the water seems enticing.


    Yep, weblogs, as we now know them, though they currently seem the endpoint and total fruition of technological online mass interaction, will someday just be another item in a list, an intermediate link in a chain, such as the one that I’ve devised above.  The only question that remains is whether the next step onward is one of gradual transition or a punctuated leap.

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