No! No! No!

The two bloggers most commonly recognized as the medium’s pioneers, Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan, are, remarkably, still at it.

No, Michael Massing. You’re wrong. For the umpteenth time, blogging did not begin with political blogs. The media may not have paid attention to blogs until bloggers started to write about things the media cared about, but that does not mean that they did not exist or that people were not reading them.

I am so tired of this shit. Blogging was not always about politicos getting into pissing matches with other politicos. It was about people sharing cool stuff with each other on the web and forming a community. Christ — blogging had been going on for quite a while before political bloggers started in and then began claiming that they invented the thing. Read Rebecca Blood’s early history of blogging. The term blog itself was invented before Sullivan or Kaus ever started turning their thoughts into pixels. Jason Kottke has been blogging since 1998. Rebecca Blood has been blogging since April 1999. And a certain someone’s blog is turning 10 years old in a few weeks.

I’m sick of the pre-political bloggers getting short shrift. Andrew Sullivan writes an addictive blog and has done great things with the form. But he started in 2001 — just two weeks before I did, in fact — which was well after the blog pioneers.

Just because the media doesn’t care about something does not mean it doesn’t exist or matter.