The Blogfather Revisited

Now that I have a new G4 iBook (cheers! applause!) -- it feels all stiff and intimidating and seductive, and smells exactly like the new doll I got for Christmas when I was 9, and I'm in danger of staying up all night with it -- I already have both Safari and Firefox, and I can read Eclectic Refrigerator and all those other Blogger blogs that used to display as a string of single words trickling down the right-hand side of my screen, like Chinese. So I discover that back in February the Fridge linked to my post on who might have been the Blogfather, the ancestral ur-blogger, that evoked such a splendid panoply of ancestors, from E.B. White to Pliny the Younger clear back to the Lascaux cave painter. One of those was the indefatigable 17th-century diarist Samuel Pepys, and now I learn from the Fridge the astonishing fact that someone is posting Pepys' diary as a blog! -- with links!! And comments -- which are called "annotations"! ("It is beginning to sound as a sort of mantra, the intended sticking to work and no more play. I think Sam is aware that he will often stray from the straight path.") This has to be seen to be believed. It is surely one of the greatest learning devices ever dreamed up; it will transport you to another land and time -- no, it opens up a two-way wormhole of communication between centuries. I had written in the comments to my post:

This is sending me back to read some of these people again with new eyes, or to read others for the first time. And I have a feeling they will seem like contemporaries in a way they wouldn't have five years ago -- liberated from their entombment in time (as we are from our isolation from one another in space) by the strong feeling that you could almost reach out and trade links with them. Fellow-members of the cross-temporal fraternity/sorority of bloggers!

Little did I know that someone -- Phil Gyford -- had already (starting in January 2003) done away with the "almost" and made that fantasy come true!

- amba

Comments

[sharon]

So glad you've discovered Sam. During the first year (1660/2003) I kept trying to make converts, but people felt so burdened by the notion of reading it every day for 10 years.
Anyway, every morning I print out an entry (usually 2 to 3 days in arrears to catch the annotations) and give it to my husband. We then pass it on to a neighbor (a late riser) so that we all get Sam along with coffee and the morning paper. Yes, it is like time travel and it is delicious