Imagine, voters waking up every day, annotating the news and actually caring enough to save their papers for prosperity. See Workbench:
The First Blogger Died in 1794. On Scripting News this morning, Dave Winer nominates Harry Truman as the patron of bloggers.
I'd like to go a bit further back to find the patron saint of weblogging: Harbottle Dorr.
Dorr was writing a hyperlinked daily journal on current events two centuries before the technology existed:
An average citizen marking up the news every day with his own opinions and furiously cross-referencing his work, Dorr was a blogger. Reading about this collection makes me want to park myself at a microfilm reader for a few months to read this hypertext. So many questions: Was he a warblogger? Did he fisk people? Would he have objected to autolinking?
When Dorr died in 1794, his entire estate consisted of the four "newspaper books" that constituted his blog. They sold for 7 pounds and 10 shillings. [Workbench]
Now, if information, and the free access thereof, is the cornerstone of democracy, is it not every citizen's imperative to be "informed"? Ah, I feel an essay coming on...
5:11:54 AM 
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