Who Was the First Blogger?
27th November 2011
James Altucher thinks it was Charles Schulz. He makes a good case.
Charles Schulz, the creator of Charlie Brown, wrote the strip from 1950 to 2000, just about every day. He was basically a blogger. I don’t even know if he missed a single day.
It’s hard to come up with ideas that are meaningful every day. But he did. Here’s 7 things I learned by reading his various biographies and also by probably reading every strip he every produced.
November 27th, 2011 at 09:56
He only makes a good case that Schulz was in some ways like a blogger, not that he was one, and certainly not that he was the first.
Walt Kelly came before Charles Schulz, and Al Capp before Walt Kelly, and George Herriman before Al Capp, and whoever drew The Yellow Kid came before him, and political cartoonists and society columnists came before that.
And the 17th century French gazettes included what were in some ways blogs. They were probably the first series of such published opinions, since I suspect that those were the first periodicals. But isn’t Martin Luther’s list of 95 theses basically a blog post? How about a series of letters, intended to be read aloud to many people to correct their behavior and teach them, written to the Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Phillipians, Thesalonians, etc.? Regular speakers in the Athenian Forum? Storytellers in the Babylonian marketplace?
As soon as you change the meaning of “blogger” away from “somebody who posts logs on the Web”, you can make the first one pretty much anybody who ever wrote down an opinion.