Even more blog-like, Leonardo's notebooks: 2 pages seen above, courtesy of the British Library. Renaissance figures like Leonardo competed for their livelihood with one another in the form of patronage by wealthy nobles and merchants, so they were a bit circumspect about their rants and ramblings and investigations, lest they give a rival a leg up.

Leonardo trained himself to write backwards to make it more difficult for others to read his notes. Even so, he and his trusted contemporaries advanced their ideas by talking and occasionally collaborating via letters. Leonardo and his late 15th-early 16th century colleagues were very early adopters of networked idea exchange. They were like the people who put up the first Web pages, shortly after Tim Berners-Lee invented http.

Roughly a century later, figures like Galileo and Locke and Descartes were fully engaged using the media both of printed books and written letters, which by then could reliably be sent via a now-robust postal system that spanned Europe. The Royal Societies that formed to read and report on these letters and books, were a physical instantiation of a blogroll, like-minded individuals who shared interests. These were the 16th century equivalent of Webloggers - their letters were written for a wider audience than their immediate, geographical confreres. Imagine if Leonardo had been able to blog: and his investigations, findings and inventions had been widely available... The future had arrived way early in Europe, in the person of Leonardo, it just wasn't widely distributed...
Comments 11:30:47 AM    

Turns out others have been thinking about the issue: Seyed Razavi says it's a reason he built BlogShares. Bernie notes that BlogShares takes into account all of the drivers of value in a Weblog (e.g. the celebrity of the author). It remains an interesting problem to figure out both how to discover, and fairly rank, heretofore undiscovered 'lone genius' sites...
Comments 10:11:05 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures