There are older blogs on the web (mine is 13+ years). What impresses me about Jeff is that he has built up such a huge audience, and effectively converted that into a business. I don't always agree with his opinions, but that's fine I can still admire his output.
I've had a few offers to buy my domain but even though it's not one people follow I've still become attached to it as part of my identity, it's used for my main email address.
Just looked now and archive.org's earliest capture of my alicious.com domain is 2004. By that it's my 10yr anniversary in 2 weeks. Though I started the site ~1996 [it was on Geocities for a time too] I don't think any content remains from then.
