Re: history of online comments

I'm slightly proud to say that Travels with Samantha (
http://philip.greenspun.com/samantha/ ) went live in the fall of 1993 with
a reader comment feature. This book was the genesis of photo.net (because
so many people asked me questions about how to take pictures).

On the other hand, I'm embarrassed to say that the comment forms were
processed by a program in the Lisp language (Scheme dialect), using a
library of CGI tools developed by Jonathan Rees.

I'm not sure that I was the first to build a book where the original idea
was to collect and redistribute multiple perspectives, but on the other
hand I don't remember anything earlier. My theory was that others on the
Internet would have more interesting stuff to say about each of the places
than I, a visitor, would.

Philip


On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 9:07 PM, Gerald Oskoboiny <gerald@w3.org> wrote:

> * Michael Erard <michael.erard@gmail.com> [2013-08-14 15:11-0400]
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm a journalist with a magazine assignment to write about online
> > comments and commenting environments, and Ian Jacobs at W3
> > recommended that I write to this list. I'm looking for definitive
> > answers to these questions:
> >
> > 1. What was the first website to offer the ability for readers/users
> > to leave comments? (A Wikipedia entry on "blogs" says that Bruce
> > Ableson at OpenDiary.com was the first but I've been unable to
> > confirm this as yet.)
>
> A few early ones that come to mind:
>
> Daniel LaLiberte's HyperNews project (begun Mar '94) was a
> general web-based discussion system (not really user comments;
> meant to be more collaborative)
>
> http://web.archive.org/web/20000925134254/http://www.hypernews.org/HyperNews/get/www/collab/conferencing.html?nogifs
>
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.infosystems.www/Gu8x1kvEDHI/Xohjt5MrCZ0J
>
> In the mid-'90s web sites commonly used guestbooks to allow
> readers to post comments; here is a reference from Mar '94
> but I don't know if this was the first:
>
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.infosystems.www/YlknwGoATXg/ZJCRPqhDy4gJ
>
> There were hundreds of sites with guestbooks by the time I
> made this list (Aug '95, I think):
> http://impressive.net/people/gerald/1996/ugweb/guestbooks/
>
> Philip Greenspun's photo.net site had user comments some time
> in the mid- to late-'90s but I am not sure when that feature
> was added (philg, care to comment?)
>
> --
> Gerald Oskoboiny     http://www.w3.org/People/Gerald/
> World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)    http://www.w3.org/
> tel:+1-604-906-1232             mailto:gerald@w3.org
>