Weblogs and Permalinks: Reflecting Back
03:29 PM - Jun 18, 2003
Tom Coates of plasticbag.org wrote an interesting article last week On Permalinks and Paradigms... exploring how permalinks work, who coined the term 'permalink' and how the permalink started in the first place. Just as interesting to read is the comments section for Tom’s article where you’ll find quite a few pioneers of the early blogging days commenting and sharing stories and links.
Tom’s article got my brain thinking back in time, too. When I started my weblog during December 2000 and used the 'permalink' term for my post links I remember a few people were concerned that others might not know what the term meant. It didn’t take long before it became a commonplace term, though.
Matt Haughey brought up an important point about the role of permalinks:
[Home: Mobile · Main]“In the weblog book I contributed to we repeatedly state how blogs are built on a post paradigm instead of a page paradigm that the web was originally built upon. I really think permalinks made that distinction clear and allowed the by-post model to blossom. It made every contribution to a site behave like a distinct unit that could be linked to, quoted from, and extracted. It is funny how we don’t even think about it anymore.”