The bloggers' historian.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Soundbite - Scott Rosenberg - Interview

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As Scott Rosenberg was helping to found the webzine Salon in 1995, a scrappier form of publishing was emerging elsewhere on the Internet. Blogs, as they were soon known, were quirky, low-budget sites--part diary, part conversation, part list of links. "I noticed very early that these were the pages I kept going back to," Rosenberg says. "What I came gradually but steadily to see was that I was going back to them because they worked. They were an appropriate and effective format for publishing on the Web."

Rosenberg's new history, Say Everything (Crown), explores how the now-ubiquitous blog form emerged, evolved, and left its mark on everything from national politics to the private lives of ordinary Americans. Managing Editor Jesse Walker spoke with Rosenberg in July.

Q: Of the '90s pioneers you write about in the first section of the book, are there any that you feel haven't really gotten their due?

A: In a way, that whole era is unjustly forgotten. The Web moves really quickly, and we've had several generations of excitement. Today we have Twitter and Facebook and all of that, and people are having experiences in which they feel that they're doing things for the first time. But nearly all of these experiences are things that people went through in the '90s or the early part of the 2000s, whether it was revealing too much of your life and getting in trouble, or dreaming of some sort of utopia where we can all express ourselves and never get into fights. Telling those stories just seemed important.

Q: By your account, the very first website was a blog of sorts. Do you think there's something about the Web as a medium that makes the blog format come naturally?

A: Yes. Both Tim Berners-Lee's first website and what became Netscape's "What's New?" page had this simple, reverse-chronological list form. It's like a piece of the Web's DNA.

Even today, with YouTube and podcasting, the Web is primarily a text medium. But it's also a dynamic medium. So how do you make text dynamic? You need some kind of simple structure that can be governed by a piece of software. And the form that worked and was immediately comprehensible was this...