Blog historian Rudolf Ammann has done it again. First he pointed out that my statement in Say Everything that Cameron Barrett’s original blogroll had not been archived was inaccurate. Now he has dug up links to most of the original content in Dan Gillmor’s pioneering EJournal blog for the San Jose Mercury News, beginning in 1999. (Here’s a link to Gillmor’s very first post, in October 1999.) Based on Gillmor’s comments to me in an interview for the book, along with my own failed efforts to find them, I’d concluded that these pages were not available on the Web in any form.
I’m delighted that another little slice of Web history turns out to be available; grateful, once more to the amazing Internet Archive, for saving so much of our collective past and making it available via the “Wayback Machine”; and making a mental note to myself to try many more alternate domains when hitting a wall in archive searches.
I am no slouch in the ways of the Wayback Machine, but I tip my hat to Ammann, who is plainly a more adept archival sleuth than I am!