Jason Kottke recently linked to a post on the Boston Globe’s website showing what they call a “webpage-like” news wall from the first-half of the 20th C. Of course, the medium is much older. As Will Durant writes in Ceasar and Christ,

To bring the Senate under public scrutiny, [Julius Ceasar] established the first newspaper by having clerks make a record of Senatorial and other public proceedings and news, and post these Acta Diurna,or "Daily Doings," on the walls of the forums. From these walls the reports were copied and sent by private messengers to all parts of the Empire.

Not only did Ceasar have a webpage, he had an PubSub feed.

It’s interesting that Mark Zuckerberg, who cites his love of classical literature (even though his employees have misinterpreted some of it.) and was called "Our New Ceasar" by Vanity Fair runs a company with a central feature called the “Wall.”

Interesting, but unsurprising. No matter where you look, you can find history repeating (or rhyming.) I used to work for WebMD, who has a set of forums where users with various ailments can exchange information, post about their symptoms and how they’ve dealt with them. It seems to have the potential to be an efficient--and forgetting the other online medical boards before it--revolutionary way for people to exchange information; replacing or modifying the role of a medical professional. But then one might remember when Herodotus writes of the Babylonians:

The following custom seems to me the wisest instituition.... They have no physicians, but when a man is ill, they lay him in the public square, and the passers-by come up to him, and if they have ever had his disease themselves or have known any one who has suffered from it, they give him advice, recommending him to do whatever they found good in their own case, or in the case known to them; an no one is allowed to pass the sick man in silence without asking him what his ailment is.

• last modified: 05/21/2011