The Case Against
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The Case Against was a website published from 1995-1999. Using a highly personalized, blog-like format and tone, The Case Against covered United States political culture. While far more structured than blogs of early 21st century, it was largely the technical and editorial effort of one individual who used multiple pseudonyms.
Had the term "blog" existed in 1997, The Case Against would have been considered to be a blog -- perhaps even one of the first. In its time, it defied categorization and was often mistaken for as a serious news and opinion magazine. Yahoo! Full Coverage frequently linked to The Case Against on equal billing with the New York Times, Time Magazine, The Washington Post, and other major news outlets in the Yahoo News section -- a quaint anecdote that is laughable in 2006, but gives powerful testimony to the immaturity of the WWW medium in the mid-1990's.
The Case Against deployed a diverse array of editorial techniques, ranging from Op-Eds, straight news reporting, economic analysis, music reviews, and satire. It recorded an average of 40,000 unique page views per week. The Case Against was an early adopter of un-monitored user-comments on its published items.
