I know of course about Risks and Telecom (you’ll find my postings in both of them going far back.) The lines are subtle. What distinguishes a “blog” is argued about a lot. A personal voice is a big part of it. The earliest HTML-blogs, much like mod.ber, were just the blogger’s collection of interesting web links of the day. Some were more the author’s own writing. Both forms are going strong.

Telecom digest had a personal voice to it with Patrick making a number of added-on comments, but it was still, at its core, like Risks, a discussion mailing list, with a moderator. Posts that were on topic were not rejected because they weren’t good enough in the moderator’s opinion. Risks had a lesser personal voice, and perhaps had a touch of editing for quality, I would have to ask Peter about that.

What made RHF unusual for moderated groups was I rejected 98% of what I looked at to make the group. Most moderated groups rejected just a few percent for quality at most, mostly the moderators rejected duplicates, off-topics and calmed the occasional flamewar. They were moderators, not editors.

But it is subtle. I think mod.ber’s claim is less subtle, it meets all the tests. It was the “boing boing” of 1984. There may be some earlier mailing lists I don’t know of that were personal journals or personally edited selections, I would want to hear about them.

As for Richmond, the article wasn’t kind to him, but remember, it was literally associating me with the Nazis, so I still wouldn’t perceive the result as very balanced.

As for the press, there are all sorts of press out there, most are good hearted, and the business press are mostly there to work with you. But in all cases the best advice remains to figure out ahead what your message is, and say mostly that. Almost every press interview I’ve done has resulted in half an hour of conversation being diluted down to just 1 to 3 lines the reporter felt useful.