Thomas Paine

Tedra Osell, a professor of English Literature at the University of Guelph, says that blogging began back in the 1700s, when people published their own writing and circulated them around the coffee houses and homes of England. In a Montreal Gazette article titled Blogs a hit in the cafes of the 1700s, she says that these self-published works, "often just a single sheet, brought about social change by highlighting debates over politics, women's roles, fashions and behaviour".

The phenomenon was not limited to one side of the Atlantic. In the colonial U.S., the Pamphleteers did the same as the self-publishers in England. The most famous of them, Thomas Paine, wrote what were essentially blog entries on why the colonies should seek independence. According to the blog Eric's Grumbles before the Grave:

His pamphlet was printed enough times that virtually every adult man and woman in the Colonies potentially owned a copy, and very likely 80% of them did. He laid the case so well that, by the time the Continental Congress met in June to take up the case of What To Do™, popular support had shifted from reconciliation to independence. He did all this without being a major publisher, having the support of a major newspaper, being backed by any government or other organization or even being particularly wealthy. Indeed, he did such a good job that John Adams is known to have said, after the Declaration of Independence, "History is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine."

The idea of bloggers-as-pamphleteers isn't a new one. Here are some other articles that put forth this idea: