I'm seeing a repeating pattern in the maturity of the web, which is that early bits of our history get forgotten, for various reasons and then young upstarts come along and have the idea and think it's their own and decide that the earliest that their mates can remember is the definition of the beginning of time.
I suppose this is just the way generations work, young people ignoring their immediate predecessors' contribution to culture, but there are differences between how it worked when books were the main source and repository of knowledge and now where we've got a dynamic and only partially updated web to help us resolve what are facts.
A couple of years ago, for example, someone started a "London Social Media Café" presenting it as a totally novel idea and failing to research my use of the term back as far as August 2007. The latest instance is an article on the origins of podcasting in the UK.
This is a spectacularly badly researched piece. If you know anything about this the first paragraph will have you shaking your head...
the moment it started to truly take off in 2014. Podcasting has been around since around 2007 when first shows started to appear on iTunes.
So what do we do with this sort of thing? Is it important? Well we can complain in the comments and point out the wrong bits, but the onus seems to be on those being erased from history to keep an eye open and correct the dumb n00bs. But I think there's also something important about creating our own historical records, timelines and archives so that if people do try to do some research before writing their own puff piece about the new thing that's really an old thing, they might stumble over all the prior art.
Image: the actual first UK podcasting event in September 2005
