Re: history of online comments

Actually, the first reference I could find for this annotation
functionality is a bit earlier in November of 1992:

    http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1992/0341.html

Maybe Dan can remember if it dates back even earlier...but it was a
while ago :-)

//Ed



On Sun, Aug 18, 2013 at 6:11 PM, Ed Summers <ehs@pobox.com> wrote:
> 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 22:17:56 UTC