Jorn Barger, the NewsPage Network, and the Emergence of the Weblog Community is my contribution to the Hypertext and Community track of the Hypertext 2009 conference. Working from the online archival record, the paper aims to show that the “weblog community”, the blogosphere’s predecessor, was conceived by Jorn Barger, who departed from Dave Winer‘s NewsPage model and in 1998 built it into a community of practice with the assistance of early webloggers such as Raphael Carter, amongst others.

The paper’s “definitive” PDF version is scheduled to appear in the ACM Digital Library, but will remain behind a paywall. The revised HTML version offers live hyperlinks to a number of records in the Internet Archive and usenet archives, many of which haven’t seen the light of day in a long time.

Any factual corrections or comments on the paper are welcome and might contribute towards a revised version of the piece. Please leave a comment or contact me via e-mail.

Tech note: The paper’s Wikipedia-style citations were generated by exporting Wikipedia citation templates from Zotero and putting them through Cite.

Legal note: © ACM, 2009. This is the author’s version of the work. The “definitive” version is about to be published in HT’09: Proceedings of the twentieth ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia. The gory details of the copyright agreement are available (reader discretion advised).

Related interest: Lilia Efimova’s conference paper is called Weblog as a personal thinking space.