Re: history of online comments

Thanks to all for these notes! I'll be in touch with individual folks 
with follow-up questions.

Michael

On 8/18/13 7:36 PM, Liddy Nevile wrote:
> 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
>>
>
>


-- 

Michael Erard

www.babelnomore.com

Received on Monday, 19 August 2013 12:40:27 UTC