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bpggle and I have been wondering in email exactly what roles historical people would have played on today's Internet. Samuel Pepys is the immediate and obvious candidate for blogger, as is Casanova, I think.

bpggle says he can see Samuel Johnson as a pundit working for Slate and Cicero as a blogger, and I can see Mary Wollstonecraft (the "Vindication of the Rights of Women" person, not her "Frankenstein" daughter) as a commentator at Salon.com. Who do you guys see in what role?

And I just drew a parallel between LJ usernames and Egyptian hieroglyphics - I can't write a username without doing the whole linky-thing to it, even when uncalled-for, because it looks wrong. It ought to be bold, in blue, and with the little graphic by it, like the Egyptians surrounding royal names with cartouches.

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Saint Simon would be another, except he'd strive to limit access to those of rank.

I strongly suspect Evelyn Waugh might have been a blogger as well--mixing reportage of upper crust parties with his ultra conservative diatribes against the government, specifically socialism.

I wonder if Thomas Jefferson would have been a blogger. Maybe Franklin, certainly Tom Paine!

Oh, and of course Madame Sevigny. Liselotte as well, if she could do it anonymously.

I'd love to read a Franklin blog. :)

The Federalist Papers would have been a blog, and still anonymous.

Karl Marx would have a blog, linked to by all the rabble-rousers.

Lenin would use ads on Marx's blog to organize demos and do fund-raising.

De Tocqueville would have photo-essays of all these Americans having town meetings with no nobleman leading them.

Lewis and Clark would have a photoblog, marking each entry with GPS coords.

Charles Dickens would have a daily webcomic.

John Brown would leave nasty comments on everyone's blog for being slavers or not being sufficiently devoted to the cause.

I love the idea of a Lewis and Clark photoblog.

And now I can't shake the idea that Che Guevara would be a Marx-blog sockpuppet. (Not that I'm significantly acquainted with either of their lives and works beyond the Marxist-theory anthropology I've studied in classes.)

http://www.pepysdiary.com/

Yup, it's been on my feeds for a while. :)

I think Martha Washington would have a recipe website.

I think Martin Luther would be a staunch advocate of Open Source Software and a member of the EFF.

I think Inquisitor Torquemada would be the new "Internet Czar" and try to increase governmental control over content and increase punishment for the most minor of infractions.

I think Luthor and Torquemada would have a throw-down in one of the more public blog-spaces.

god4all: OMG U H8TER!!

heathen_basher: DAMN STRAIGHT!!

rachelmanija said somewhere or other t'other day, Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book is totally a Livejournal.

And I think Virginia Woolf would have focused her correspondence energies into blogging and would have become even more impressively famous as a critic due to being accessible to everyone to talk with.

Re: the little LJ-username-tag-head-thingie: a linguist friend (

wayman) tells me that it is a determinative, a kind of written sign with one distinct meaning that is used in daily language usage but has no pronunciation. The last language to use determinatives regularly was Sumerian, and the Swarthmore linguistics department has gotten all excited about English now having one.

That determinative thing is spiffy!

James Joyce would have been an excellent blogger but his posts would ramble on for pages and no one would ever understand what his point was...

George Sand would also be an excellent blogger, writing about her romances and Parisian society.

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