Re: history of online comments

If you squint enough to see commenting as a form of annotation you
might be interested in an email Marc Andreesen sent in May of 1993 [1]
about annotation functionality built into Mosaic...that was
subsequently removed. I ran across his email while doing a bit of
research for a post I wrote for Hypothes.is.

//Ed

[1] http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q2/0416.html
[2] http://hypothes.is/blog/cross-format-annotation/

On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 9:27 PM, Philip Greenspun <pgreenspun@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>

Received on Sunday, 18 August 2013 22:11:44 UTC