All About Blogging

Enter The Blogger

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.

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.

Related Topics About Blogger

A Business
Blogs are the elder sibling in the social networking world, and are still better at providing information and feedback in a more permanent form. Once blogging software made it possible for a business and its customers to interact in this way, the lines of communication opened widely. The company can provide up-to-date information about products and services, and customers can respond, thus both sides of the relationship benefit.

Video Blogging
The possibilities for blogging keep expanding, with the latest stage of development being video blogging. This takes blog entries to a whole new level, beyond the static text-based type, or even posts with some photos and other graphics, into a much more dynamic and immediate realm. Blog posts come alive in a whole new way, and establish the blogger as an intermediary between the formerly divided spheres of text and video.

Lost
As people continue to embrace new technologies and recognize the expense of constantly upgrading their data into the new formats, many resign themselves to lost records. Both the ordinary person as well as news makers and analysts who publish weblogs may eventually vanish from the digital record. Even just deleting one's own email could erase documents that might have helped future historians understand the events of this time period.