BlogTree.com

August 4, 2002 8:37 AM

BlogTree.com is a blog genealogy site: "You can register your blogs and record which blogs inspired their creation." It's an interesting new way to catalog and find blogs in tandem with Blogdex's social network explorer. Which blogs inspired you to start your own blog and have you in turn inspired anyone else to blog? The favorite blogs thread was a long time ago so those of you who've had blogs for years, which new(ish) blogs inspire you to continue blogging now? [ via Blogroots ]
posted by lia (23 comments total)

(favorite blogs thread)
posted by lia at 8:44 AM on August 4, 2002

Even after I scanned the legal page which left with the feeling I just signed away my firstborn, I registered at this site. But after that I just felt confused.

I need to go re-scan that faq, but here's how I came to blogging:
Fred Langa's great pc newsletter led me to Chris Pirillo and The Lockergnome Newsletters which are always welcome in my mail. Chris started talking about blogging and how he liked the daypop top 40 list. Which led to boing boing , memigo and metafilter, and to a couple of months ago with my own inevitable contribution to the blogswarm.

Spitting Image a photo blog is another fave.
posted by gametone at 11:19 AM on August 4, 2002

MisterPants started the itch to weblog for me. I got tested, just to be sure that's what it was.

And Visible Darkness.
posted by Kafkaesque at 11:33 AM on August 4, 2002

I had been doing a site that I didn't know was a weblog, and then I took it down. Seeing Peterme made me start doing it again, and lots of other sites have kept me inspired in the years since.
posted by anildash at 11:46 AM on August 4, 2002

My inspiration (then and now) is 'Bred Crumbs, run by a guy I met back in my training wheel days on CompuServe. Since hurtling myself into blogspace, I'm proud to say I've sired four other blogs: Keeping Score, The Driver's Log, John Popa's LiveJournal, and a private intranet blog which a buddy of mine uses for evil management purposes.

I should also credit non-blog TeeVee.org with making self-publishing seem awfully attractive.
posted by GreyWingnut at 11:51 AM on August 4, 2002

All the sites I visited inspired me. There were no big names: no boing boing, no obscure store, no kottke, no metafilter, not even wil wheaton. No, it was the concept of the thing that got me, right off the bat. But it was this place that really spurred me. I felt that the "blogosphere" needed as much positive thought as possible. It was less than two weeks after seeing my first blog that I had my own.
posted by ashbury at 12:10 PM on August 4, 2002

I don't even remember. How sad.
posted by fujikosmurf at 1:36 PM on August 4, 2002

Not sure that it's such a great idea, myself. After all, aren't many of the real world's problems caused by people's "genealogy", or others' interpretation of it? Getting your inspiration for a weblog from somewhere's great. You could even tell your mentor - they might find that nice, or inspiring themselves. So go tell them.

But Blogtree is, most likely, only going to be used by the weblog snobs to create a weblog caste system - look, it's happening already at Plasticbag, where the author's busily telling folk they're not as early an adopter (and so, by implication, not as hardcore) as others.

This, IMHO, is only going to lead to tears before bedtime.
posted by larkin at 2:26 PM on August 4, 2002

Interesting idea, Larkin, although I don't think it'll be quite that bad.
I was actually wondering last night about people who could/would just lie on the thing. The place is pretty obviously going to become a source for clicks, at least for those who tend to look for new sites via peoples' link lists, as I do.
So it would be understandable for me to follow a person's child and sibling links if I like their blog, for example.

Not that there's really any good way to authenticate the information.

One thing that's neat, though, is that the actual URLs are shown, which at least partially circumvents my other concern: People spamming it for clicks.
posted by Su at 3:16 PM on August 4, 2002

People spamming it for clicks.

Why would anybody do that?
posted by machaus at 3:24 PM on August 4, 2002

::sigh:: i just don't understand why i need to register my sex and birthday to participate. it should be voluntary; i don't want to participate in their collection of data about me, even if they pretend it's about mother/father relations. bleh.
posted by zegooober at 3:46 PM on August 4, 2002

It's got a few bugs -- I found Rebecca's Pocket under rebeccablood.net/, rebeccablood.net, and www.rebeccablood.net/. Blogdex has some good URL-munging code -- any chance of ganking that?
posted by dhartung at 3:47 PM on August 4, 2002

I suppose it was Lockergnome where I first heard about blogs, maybe a year ago. I tried to get my family interested in using one to coordinate family travels. No interest. As blogging came more common, seems like most were just Jerry Seinfeld in text (a show about NOTHING).

Finally, I have my own and it is about....well, nothing, except life from a dirt road.

And my family remains as disinterested in blogging as they were a year ago. Gotta find your own drummer.
posted by fred1st at 6:06 PM on August 4, 2002

the author's busily telling folk they're not as early an adopter (and so, by implication, not as hardcore) as others

For the last time, darn it, Eli Chanticleer invented the Weblogging Machine : Dave Winer and The Imaginary A-Listers and all the rest came to the party much, much later...
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:56 PM on August 4, 2002

But Blogtree is, most likely, only going to be used by the weblog snobs to create a weblog caste system - look, it's happening already at Plasticbag, where the author's busily telling folk they're not as early an adopter (and so, by implication, not as hardcore) as others.

Tom of Plasticbag likes to turn most everything into a status competetion ... but BlogTree is a genuinely interesting/informative mapping exercise, Tom's mongering be damned.
posted by donkeyschlong at 7:49 PM on August 4, 2002

Playing by the rules of the thread : I actually didn't read any bloggers and hadn't even heard of the concept when I first stumbled on Blogger.com a couple of years ago, despite the amount of time I spent on the web. I just thought to myself 'Well, this is a cool toy. What can I do with it?', and signed up.

My current blog was born as a result of a bolt of lightning while reading Evhead.com, drinking whiskey and preparing for my move to Korea in the summer of 2001. Not anything that he said, particularly, just that I realized that all of the writing I'd ever done in journals and so on had since disappeared, thanks to my peripatetic existence, and perhaps it was time to go digital.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:51 PM on August 4, 2002

Blogdex has some good URL-munging code

I wish it did but it doesn't -- to use dan's example, www.rebeccablood.net and rebeccablood.net show up as two sites on Blogdex instead of one.
posted by lia at 8:00 PM on August 4, 2002

I started along this path after seeing what Michelle did with the tilde space that Mindspring gave her. Her tilde site eventually morphed into Sapphireblue. My tilde site became Grabbingsand. Since she first met me over coffee and handed me her big black book of HTML goodness back in 1996, I think that makes me something of an early adopter, at least of the movement as a whole.

So there.
posted by grabbingsand at 9:02 PM on August 4, 2002

Blogdex has some good URL-munging code

I wish it did but it doesn't -- to use dan's example, www.rebeccablood.net and rebeccablood.net show up as two sites on Blogdex instead of one.

Yeah, Blogdex's munging code is really quite terrible. But Daypop's is pretty decent -- it seems to be able deal with stuff like www.site.com versus site.com.
posted by donkeyschlong at 9:46 PM on August 4, 2002

Wait, so Tom gets dissed on Metafilter for taking the Guardian to task because he thinks there can't really be a competition for Best British Blog, and now he gets bitched out for being into competition?
posted by RJ Reynolds at 10:40 PM on August 4, 2002

Hmmm. Actually it was kind of a joke. I think of myself as being likea third or fourth generation weblogger after people like robot wisdom, memepool, camworld, kottke, evhead, megnut etc. but people keep insisting (whether they started in 1997 or 2002) that they are all second-generation ones. I thought that was funny... Sorry...
posted by barbelith at 1:34 AM on August 5, 2002

what a 'heart-warming story of internet people connecting blah blah blah', grabbingsand. in one of your links above, michelle writes that she was sad she'd lost touch with you. i can only hope that the two of you reconnected?
posted by mlang at 6:16 AM on August 5, 2002

It was Slashdot back in '97 or '98, can't remember which -- after it was Chips and Dips but before they even had user accounts --which introduced me to the concept.
posted by jammer at 10:26 AM on August 5, 2002