Stephen Fry & Joby Talbot– Hitchhiker’s Guide to Blogging.

I’m not sure if this is something to be celebrated but 1997 was the year the weblog was born. Blogging was dreamt up by a group of Harvard academics to once and for all test the theorem that an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of type writers will eventually produce Shakespeare. So far it’s not looking likely.

In December 1997 editor of Robot Wisdom Jorn Barger started logging sites he had visited on his website and decided on the name ‘weblog’. This was rewritten as ‘we-blog’ and the term ‘blogging’ was invented.

1997 also saw the release of Stephen Fry’s autobiography Moab Is My Washpot (covering the first twenty years of his life). It’s a little hypocritical of Fry to have a go at blogging since the only thing more egotistical than writing about your humdrum life and expecting to read it is writing about your humdrum life and expecting people to pay to read it. Near the end of the book he writes:

“I know that my early life was at one and the same time so common as to be unremarkable, and so strange as to be the stuff of fiction. I know of course that this is how all human lives are, but that it is only given to a few of us to luxuriate in the bath of self-revelation, self-curiosity, apology, revenge, bafflement, vanity and egoism that goes under the name Autobiography.”

Now we all get to luxuriate under the name blogging.


Stephen Fry and Joby Talbot - Hitchhiker's Guide to Blogging

Buy Moab Is My Washpot

Buy Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Soundtrack