When I started, news aggregators hadn’t reached a tipping point. There was Slashdot and some other stuff, but the vast majority of people subscribed to RSS feeds.
I posted a few essays and shared the links, but I didn’t have a “readership” until I had an RSS feed and people could subscribe. So I consider myself to have started blogging when there was an RSS feed.
(A few years back I abandoned that, as I felt that the best way to reach people was via aggregators like HN and Twitter.)
At what point do you think you went from "posting essays online" to being a "blogger"?