Jorn Barger (; born 1953) is an American blogger, best known as editor of Robot Wisdom, an influential early weblog. Barger coined the term weblog to describe the process of "logging the web" as he surfed. He has also written extensively on James Joyce and artificial intelligence, among other subjects; his writing is almost entirely self-published.
Life
Born 1953 in Yellow Springs, Ohio, as the second child of Rex Barger and Criss Barger Stange, Jorn Barger spent his childhood in his hometown. At age 11 he got to use an early programmable digital computer, the Minivac 601. His family moved to Bemus Point, New York, in 1966.
In high school Barger specialized in math and science, but also read Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, and Jiddu Krishnamurti. He graduated a year early, as co-valedictorian from Maple Grove Jr.-Sr. High School in Bemus Point, then attended Jamestown Community College, Antioch College, New College of Florida and University at Buffalo without taking a degree. In 1973 he decided against a career in computing and "worked on self-discovery" instead for the next six years. During this period, in 1978, he lived for six months at The Farm, Stephen Gaskin's intentional community in Tennessee.
During the first half of the 1980s he programmed games and educational software for the Apple II, the Commodore 64, and the Atari 8-bit family. From 1989 to the end of 1992, Barger worked as a research programmer at Northwestern University's Institute for the Learning Sciences under the artificial intelligence researcher Roger Schank. He is not known to have held regular employment since and supports himself with "odd bits of contract work."
Previously a longtime resident of the Rogers Park neighborhood in Chicago, Barger was living in Socorro, New Mexico as of late 2003. He has a daughter named Elizabeth.
Usenet
Barger has been an active Usenet participant since 1989, with "nearly ten thousand postings" to his credit. He wrote early FAQs on ASCII art, Kate Bush, Thomas Pynchon, and James Joyce. In 1994 he formulated the "Inverse Law of Usenet Bandwidth": "The more interesting your life becomes, the less you post... and vice versa." As an "unstoppable Usenet poster who could carry on simultaneous debates about Ibsen, Chomsky, artificial intelligence, and Kate Bush," he became an "online legend" who would also get cited in the national press as an expert on Usenet.
Weblog
Barger started his Robot Wisdom site in February 1995, publishing essays and resources on James Joyce, AI, history, Internet culture, hypertext design, and technology trends. Announcements of plans for a future "hardcopy edition" of Robot Wisdom for purchase began appearing at the foot of some of the site's pages.
On December 17, 1997, inspired by Dave Winer's Scripting News and running on Winer's Frontier publishing software, Barger began posting daily entries to his Robot Wisdom Weblog in the hope of finding "an audience who might see the connections between [his] many interests." These postings featured "a list of links each day shaped by his own interests in the arts and technology," thus offering a "day-to-day log of his reading and intellectual pursuits" and coining the term "weblog" as a novel form of web publishing. The term was shortened to "blog" by Peter Merholz in 1999.
Barger has also described his intentions in terms of exploration and discovery: to elucidate "what treasures were there" and to "make the web as a whole more transparent," a weblog needed to provide a constantly updated and well-described stream of the "best web links." Robot Wisdom's Net.literate portal, which started in July 1998, was a human-edited web directory that served as a complement to Barger's weblog and aimed to provide the best links on a wide range of topics arranged in ten categories.