BLOG HISTORY: Oliver Willis points out this brief history of the weblog. It's particularly instructive for me; I've been only aware of the warblogs since I started this thing, which for me means mostly the recommended sites on Instapundit and Samizdata. You know, this whole blog explosion since the attacks, which isn't mentioned in Rebecca Blood's history above --which I guess is a second coming of the form. I feel like such a rube, or like Marco Polo "discovering" China, which might be the same thing. I like this paragraph (written over a year ago):

So why doesn't every bookmark list contain five weblogs? In the beginning of 1999 it really seemed that by now every bookmark list would. There was a bit of media attention and new weblogs were being created every day. It was a small, quick-growing community and it seemed to be on the edge of a wider awareness. Perhaps the tsunami of new weblogs created in the wake of Pitas and Blogger crushed the movement before it could reach critical mass; the sudden exponential growth of the community rendered it unnavigable. Weblogs, once filters of the web, suddenly became so numerous they were as confusing as the web itself. A few more articles appeared touting weblogs as the next big thing. But the average reader, hopefully clicking through to the Eatonweb portal, found herself faced with an alphabetical list of a thousand weblogs. Not knowing where to begin, she quickly retreated back to ABCnews.com.

This is kind of what I feel like seeing all the links on Oliver's page, and all the links those links lead to. Charles Johnson seems to be preserving a historical difference between warblogs and blogs by lumping the warblogs into his non-idiotarian heading and keeping the others under "bloggage." A big difference between warblogs (post 9-11 blogs) and the blogs that were there in the years before might be that warblogs are, in general, non-left leaning. Another difference could be that the warbloggers as a group might know a lot less about computers than the older bloggers but saw Glenn Reynolds posting without any kind of fancy site design, checked out blogger, found out it was easy and just started posting. That's how I started, anyhow. It would explain why most of the non-idiotarians use blogger. But both these differences are pretty speculative.