After speculating that one of the precursors of blogs was the ubiquitous .plan files of the early Unix-heavy Internet, Cruftbox has posted a roundup of sites that linked to the theory:
I was also surprised to see links from two places I had never heard of before, Weblog Bookwatch and All Consuming. Both sites appears to scan weblogs looking for links about specific books. In this case, I think it was the fact that I linked to both Rebecca Blood’s book, The Weblog Handbook and Matt Haughey’s book, We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs, that I popped up on those site.
It’s an interesting concept to have meta-blogs that automatically scan for various bits of data and synthesize an analysis of what people are posting. After many false starts, perhaps the age of intelligent agents is upon us.
Is Matt Haughey the most prominent author of We Blog? I ask this because he was quoted in the Times today and because Cruft refers to him as the singular author of the book, when as far as I can tell it was an equal collaboration with Meg and PB.