pseudopodium links to a paper about early American magazines and muses about their proto-bloglike character ... the Bodleian Library's recent decanting (noted by Languagehat) of a mass of mid-19th C. periodicals onto the web includes a run of Notes and Queries, which seems somewhat more proto-listservian: a stream of obscure questions after trivia, answered more-or-less autoritatively or crankily. I haven't found the answer to this one yet:
Whose crest is a skull with a butterfly on it, with this motto, Que sais-je?but I sure wish it were mine.