A Brief History of Blogs
Weblogs have a long history with the World Wide Web. In the earliest days of the World Wide Web back in 1992, one of the very first sites to exist was info.cern.com run by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web�¯�¿�½for CERN, one of the motivating sites behind the development of the�¯�¿�½internet.. The purpose of this page was to inform readers of news on the development of the web, and point visitors to interesting new sites: a weblog.
Berners-Lee’s site was not alone in these early days. “What’s New” pages were common for many sites in the early years of the World Wide Web. NCSA started their “What’s New” page soon after the opening of the info.cern.com site, and Netscape came out with their own version in 1993, soon becoming one of the major weblogs of the day.
Blogs as we think of them today are more than just a news source, however. They are a combination of personal journal, message board, news site and web filter. The online personal journal movement started in the mid 1990’s, along with the boom of personal web sites in general started by free web hosting companies like Geocities and Angelfire.
One of the first important online journalers was Justin Hall, who began his long (and still currently running) online journal in 1994 while a student at Swarthmore College. His journal included events in his life, his personal thoughts, and links to sites he found to be of interest. Today Justin Hall is considered to be one of the first early bloggers.
Another important early blogger was Jorn Barger, who coined the term “weblog” with his Robot Wisdom blog in 1997. Besides coining the term, his was one of the first weblogs to include interlinking sections on various topics such as “Fun,” “Art,” “Issues,” etc. This is a common practice on blogs today, allowing better categorization and storage of blog postings.
David Winer also contributed to the development of the blogform. He is the founder and head of Scripting News, one of the longest running blogs. The company he founded, Userland, ran the web site EditThisPage.com, which was used primarily for the creation of online weblogs. He is also the creator of weblogs.com, an online ping service that reads updates in online blogs and is still used by blog-specific search engines to read updates.
This was around the time online journal or diary sites began to come into their own. One of the first of these was the web site Open Diary, that opening on October 19th, 1998. This was a precursor to sites such as the extremely popular LiveJournal. The advantage of these sites to previous blogging forms was there publishing system, that allowed users to create posts and entries without having to know any HTML, something required of bloggers previously.
In 1999 the true blogging revolution began. It is the year that the blogform achieved its most popular name, from blogger Peter Merholz. Playing with the word “weblog” he decided to begin pronouncing it “we blog,” and used the term blog to refer to his own journal and the art of making posts in his journal as blogging. This was the first use of the term blog to describe an online journal.
The origin of the word was quickly followed by the creation of sites such as Blogger.com by Pyra Labs, which cemented the names popular usage. These sites built upon the strategy employed by Open Diary and others before it, and the blogging revolution had begun.
These sites not only opened up blogging for the masses, but they created a standardization for the blogform. These sites, along with blog publishing software such as Movable Type or WordPress, created standard methods for creating, storing and updating posts, unlike the earliest weblogs which were each created uniquely by their developers using whatever methods they preferred.
In the first years of the 21st century blogging began to rise to prominence not just in the online world but in the political sphere as well. Commentators such as Andrew Sullivan (of AndrewSullivan.com) and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (of the Daily Kos) began keeping their own, politically themed blogs where they would update with links to important political stories and their own commentaries. These blogs, started in 2001-2002, began a new political blogging revolution, leading to bloggers being watched by more traditional news outlets.
Today, blogs are used by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons. Normal, regular people use them as a way to keep in touch with friends and family and update people on events in their personal lives. Political commentators use them as an outlet for their own political commentary. Corporations increasingly use blogs to update customers on goings on of their products and services. Educational institutions, libraries, political candidates, doctors, lawyers, etc., all use blogs to let people know about important goings on.
Blogs have become a major part of the internet world, combining personal web pages and message boards into a single conglomerate: a blog. In the vast world of the internet, it has created a community building forum distinct from any other, and a new communication realm in their own right.
