February 1995, publishing essays and resources on James Joyce, AI, history, Internet culture, hypertext design, and technology trends. Announcements of plans for a future "hardcopy edition" of Robot Wisdom for purchase began appearing at the foot of some of the site's pages. On December 17, 1997, inspired by Dave Winer's Scripting News and running on Winer's Frontier publishing software, Barger began posting daily entries to his Robot Wisdom Weblog in the hope of finding "an audience who might see the connections between [his] many interests." These postings featured "a list of links each day shaped by his own interests in the arts and technology," thus offering a "day-to-day log of his reading and intellectual pursuits" and coining the term "weblog" as a novel form of web publishing. The term was shortened to "blog" by Peter Merholz in 1999. Barger has also described his intentions in terms of exploration and discovery: to elucidate "what treasures were there" and to "make the web as a whole more transparent," a weblog needed to provide a constantly updated and well-described stream of the "best web links." Robot Wisdom's Net.literate portal, which started in July 1998, was a human-edited web directory that served as a complement to Barger's weblog and aimed to provide the best links on a wide range of topics arranged in ten categories. Robot Wisdom Weblog acquired a large and enthusiastic following: after a computing newsletter had celebrated the weblog as "offbeat," Village Voice described it as "one of the best collections of news and musings culled from the Web," The Guardian called Barger "a highly observant and thoughtful surfer at work" and named his site "one of the most popular weblogs." InfoWorld counted it among the very few weblogs that were "worth a visit," Brill's Content claimed that it presented "news the way web pioneers envisioned it—hypertextual, wide-reaching, and exhaustive," Fast Company called it "one of the best Web logs on the Net," Feed wrote that the site was "frequented by thousands of the Net's most knowledgeable," Wired hailed it as "one of the oldest and most popular weblogs," and The New Yorker commended Barger's "healthy appetite for everything from literature to science," whereas The Register found that "there's no better reader on the Internet than Jorn Barger." The contents of Robot Wisdom Weblog in its heyday have been recalled as a "mesmerizing sequence of arcana" and a "cornucopia of offbeat