A Short Summary Of The History Of Blogging On The Internet

Which came first, the blogger or the blogging site? When the internet began to spread in the 1990s, online communities were already gathering around common interests, using things like email lists and electronic bulletin boards to communicate. But these were “back door” methods not easily connected to the new web pages, and the personal interactions were clunky and mechanical. People wanted something more like a diary which could record their thoughts and allow people to respond. The question was how to make this possible.

This was where the software for blogging entered the picture. It built slowly up from simple beginnings, where the blogger made frequent entries but still couldn’t receive any responses. One form of the software made a quantum leap ahead when forums could be created that allowed people to make sequential posts in a “thread” that followed a particular topic. But once software emerged that allowed daily diary-style entries with the capacity for people to comment on each entry, then real modern blogs became possible.

While 1998 was the year the world first saw a blogging site as it’s known today (Open Diary, established in October), the big year for blogging seems to have been 1999, since it witnessed the debut of sites like LiveJournal, Pitas.com, Diaryland, and the well-known www.blogger.com site. Even the word “blog” was coined in this year. It was a shortened form of “weblog,” first used in 1997 by Jorn Barger on his “Robot Wisdom Weblog.” In 1999, Peter Merholz broke the word down to the phrase “we blog,” and finally Evan Williams at Pyra Labs popularized the use of ” a blog” as a noun, and “to blog” as a verb.

Once multi-member blogging sites were established, the phenomenon took off in a big way. In 2003, WordPress, another major site, was introduced, based on open source blogging software. As blogging grew in popularity, the use and value of blogs became more and more apparent, and in more realms than anyone had dreamt of being possible. Political, news, business, and home based business blogs are just a few that quickly come to mind.

In a single decade, blogs have grown from private online diary pages into popular public entertainment gossip sites, company blogs for customer relations, sports blogs, and even political blogs that report news and dig up dirt. Blogs have become very powerful public tools, with the blogger reigning supreme. Yet for most people, this tool still serves the original purpose conceived in the late 1990s; connecting with people on a personal level and sharing thoughts with one another.

With the current popularity of blogging and with thousands of new blogs springing up every day, it’s not surprising that one of the biggest segments of growth is the celebrity blog. This doesn’t just refer to blogs written by celebrities themselves (or, in some cases, their publicity people). In fact, the famous people’s sites are probably in the minority, compared to the thousands of news blogs written about them, both by fans and professional star-watchers.

Bloggers who gossip about the stars may in fact have altered the public news landscape, and not for the good. Noting the obvious popularity of celebrity blogs, even more traditional news organizations have begun including this sort of gossip in their own publications or broadcasts. If responsible, well-researched journalism is fading and the prying gossip of millions of peeping toms is what “journalism” has become, then this could perhaps sound the death knell for reliable news.

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