I was talking with some friends the other day about what a project to restore the early blogosphere might be like. Off the top of my head I thought of several sites I’d want to be sure were restored in their original condition and location. First, Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom, Evan Williams’ Evhead and Justin Hall’s Links.net. I’d also go for Blogtree, which was an innovative and fascinating effort to create basically a family tree of early blogs. I’d approach it like an archeologist. Some of the originals aren’t with us any longer, some that never got the notoriety that they deserved imho, like Jerry Pournelle, who greatly influenced me as an observer of tech. I’d love to see the earliest posts on Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch, another important blog that had enormous influence. Doc Searls, the Cluetrain, Kottke, Meghead, I know there are whole universes of blogging that I don’t know anything about, it grew so large so quickly. And it was very gratifying to see the Harvard blogs mostly restored. There was a lot of stuff that didn’t make the first cut. But it set me thinking about what we could do if we really worked at it and what that might mean for creating more persistent writing on the web for the present and future. #