Jorn Barger (born 1953 in Yellow Springs, Ohio) is a United States writer, best known on the Internet as editor of Robot Wisdom, an influential early weblog. He coined the term "weblog" to describe the process of "logging the web" as he surfed.

One of the first weblog controversies revolved around his strong anti-Zionist views, which to some crossed over into anti-Semitism.

Barger is also an expert on James Joyce and artificial intelligence. At one time he worked at Northwestern University's Institute for the Learning Sciences under the influential Roger Schank, eventually departing over philosophical differences.

An active participant in Usenet during the 1990s, he wrote early FAQs on ASCII art, Kate Bush, Thomas Pynchon, and James Joyce.

In 1994 he formulated an "Inverse Law of Usenet Bandwidth": "The more interesting your life becomes, the less you post... and vice versa."

By 2000 he felt he'd exhausted the formal possibilities of weblogs, and began instead to explore the timeline format, annotating each timeline entry with a link to a relevant resource.

Previously a long-time resident of the Rogers Park neighborhood in Chicago, Barger was living in Socorro, New Mexico as of late 2003. An outpouring of concern and speculation occurred in early 2004 because he had not been seen online for some months, but he had been known to take unexplained absences from the Internet in the past, and this turned out to indeed be the case; Robot Wisdom returned February 2005.

External links

• Robot Wisdom Weblog
• Robot Wisdom homepage
• Anti-Math story-notation language
• Textbook of romantic psychology
• Timeline of Unix/Linux
• Logarithmic timeline of universe
• Interview with Jorn on webword.com
• "Is Judaism simply a religion of lawless racists?" -Jorn Barger
• The Greatness of Robot Wisdom (The Register)
• Jorn Barger missing (MetaFilter)
• The black is back (MetaFilter)