Two blogs which have made me start my own weblog thingy have disappeared or are on hiatus.

Firstly Jorn Barger from Robotwisdom (cannot find server?) who physically disappeared and didn't update his page for more than three months. His beard grew quite long according to the photo in this Wired article which gives details of his whereabouts now. Barger started his site in 1997 and was one of the first webloggers. I have always found his internet approach interesting and instructive. He constructed some useful flat portal pages with lots of links to his favourite writer Joyce and also to Joni Mitchell, my favourite songwriter. He also thought a lot about language, artificial intelligence and the internet as a meeting-point of the two. On the other hand he was a little bit of an obsessive. The end of the Wired article shows that his common sense does not seem to be extremely well developed:

Josh Kortbein was the first music blogger. He started his Josh Blog end of 1998, I discovered it about a year later and have been reading it since. It has always been a difficult read with few links to the outside world. Music was often analysed from a theoretical viewpoint. In the past years the blog has been leaning heavily towards philosophy, especially Wittgenstein. On Christmas last year Josh wrote something personal in his blog which has always been a very rare thing. It was on depression and touched me and I wanted to mention it as this is a feeling I know but I forgot about it. Now his blog is on hiatus with the message

on top of the screen. I hope he gets better and I also wish that he will start blogging again soon. Here is the personal post which I lifted from the Google cache: