Aaron Cannon wrote:
Wow! I just read the news letter for this week. It's been a few months since last time. How long has it been this way? When did it go from the news of Project Gutenberg to the blog of Michael Hart?
It's been a long time since the PG newsletter was *just* news of Project Gutenberg. Back in March 1998 [1], the newsletter started including excerpts from Edupage. Then NewsScan in June 1999 [2]. (They shifted to the weekly newsletter when it was introduced in April 2001.) Although not news of PG, they were presumably news items that Michael Hart thought would be of interest to newsletter subscribers. He would often add editorial remarks [in square brackets], which were sometimes opinion, but were usually very short. Back in April 2003, the weekly newsletter was split into 2 (then 3, then 2) parts, of which Part 1 was Michael Hart's "Founder's Comments" section, which continued to include the news excerpts and Michael's occasional remarks on them. The October 1, 2003 weekly newsletter [3] contains what you might consider the start of "Michael Hart's blog". In it, after the NewsScan and Edupage items, Michael introduced a section entitled "[And A Few Articles That Didn't Get Enough Coverage]", including articles (apparently written by MH himself) about (1) presidential candidate Howard Dean and (2) cracking in the polar ice caps. This section soon became "More Headline News Mostly Avoided By The Major U.S. Media" and continues to this day. In the July 7, 2004 newsletter, he added: STRANGE QUOTE OF THE WEEK SIMPLE SOLUTION OF THE WEEK July 28, 2004: ODD STATISTICS OF THE WEEK August 11, 2004: ODD GOVERNMENTAL REGULATIONS OF THE WEEK October 20, 2004: PREDICTION OF THE WEEK January 26, 2005: "If we could shrink the earth's population to a village ..." March 23, 2005: DOUBLESPEAK OF THE DAY [later WEEK] June 8, 2005: POEM OF THE WEEK Many of these sections continue to appear in the newsletter. [1] http://www.gutenberg.org/newsletter/archive/PGMonthly_1998_03-04.txt [2] http://www.gutenberg.org/newsletter/archive/PGMonthly_1999_06_02.txt [3] http://www.gutenberg.org/newsletter/archive/PGWeekly_2003_10_01_Part_1.txt -Michael Dyck