Barger has also been recognized for his contribution to the emergence of the blogosphere. He was nominated among the "visionaries who changed the face of the Web in 1998" in CNET's Web Innovator Awards for having "inspired the Web Log community." Barger's work has been judged "seminal," and he reportedly "set the tone for a million blogs to come." An ACM paper discusses Barger and Chris Gulker, along with other early bloggers such as Raphael Carter, as the originators of blogging as a networked practice.
