Re: history of online comments

hey yes! that stuff was wonderful :-) - whatever the role in history

I remember Hal telling us about it and being very impressed...

Liddy

On 16/08/2013, at 11:27 AM, Philip Greenspun 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 Monday, 19 August 2013 04:17:50 UTC