In this Almanac we have often dealt with reconstruct the pioneering events of the Italian Web. Today we have to remember the birth of one of the first blogs that has just passed twenty years of activity.
It’s called Wittgenstein.it and it’s Luca Sofri’s blog. From 19 April 2010 you can find him in Il Post, of which Luca is the founder and director, but before that he was already there. Luca himself, who is a precise guy who likes to explain things well, has reconstructed the birth of the blog in two posts: the first in 2008, the second a little more recent. The posts are dedicated to the “philologists of the next millennium”, those who will go to find what was written to understand how we were. There is irony in this dedication, but also a grain of truth: Wittgenstein.it has been and still is a never banal diary of what happens, not only in politics, but in culture, in collective behavior and a lot even in journalism.
Returning to its birth, “the domain was registered on the official archives on November 20, 2000”. But it wasn’t a blog: “I had registered the url to make it a kind of online newspaper then mixed with an archive of articles I wrote in the newspapers. Of this phase, I no longer remember dates and transitions “. The blog begins to exist,” with some certainty “, on October 4, 2001. The choice of the name is curious, an Austrian philosopher and logician:” He had nothing so ambitious, for an inclination to mix and compensate I thought that a solemn and ironic name was adequate for the vain frivolity of a space of personal commentary. I considered Kierkegaard and Von Hofmannsthal, and then I decided on this. “We went well: think how many typos in the url if he had chosen the Austrian playwright.
Of all the blogs that were born at the beginning of the millennium I believe this alone survived. And it’s not just a question of the author’s tenacity, it’s that for many Wittgenstein.it is an essential reading.
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