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The History of Blogs by Keith P Stieneke
If we go way back in history, to before the Internet, then blogs can be attributed to people who kept journals or diaries of their daily thoughts or activities. But jumping ahead to the 20th century we find this journaling and diary keeping behavior to be taking place online. According to my research the first weblog was the first website, http://info.cern.ch/, built by Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. In that time period each new page on the Internet was a cause for a celebration. The Internet pioneers watched in excitement as the network grew and it was because of this that Tim pointed to all new sites as they came online. The content of this site fortunately still exists as it has been archived at the World Wide Web Consortium. In doing my research on this topic of the history of blogs, I found that probably the most notable chronicler on the history of blogs and blogging is Rebecca Blood whose information can be found at such places as http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html As the Internet grew and the World Wide Web came about, other programmers created hand-coded pages with their recommendations for surfing the Net – they “filtered” the Net. Justin Hall started his filter log in 1994. In 1998, Jorn Barger coined the term “weblog.” Rebecca Blood, says that these “link-driven sites” were very popular, and webloggers became a community. Each weblog included a list of similar filter sites. From 1993 to 1999 blogs grew until there were dozens of them online. Then an explosion occurred and now in 2005 there are millions. Much of this growth of blogs can be attributed to the Internet pioneers who in an effort to make things easier for themselves built tools that allow anyone, no matter how little Internet savvy he or she possesses, to create and maintain a blog. The most popular of these tools is Blogger.com, which was launched in August 1999. Since blogger allows a person to store their blog on bloggers own website (although you can also store it on your own), it offers great appeal to those on the Internet who do not have their own website. Blogger.com — which was recently snatched up by Google from the owner, Pyra Labs, for an undisclosed sum — may be the biggest, but it wasn't the first. The first online blog creation tools can be attributed to Andrew Smales, a programmer in Toronto who launched the first do-it-yourself blog tool — Pitas.com — in July 1999. Smales says the explosion of blog tools was simply a matter of critical mass. You may ask such questions as how a blog differs from an online forum? The answer is that a forum is using more of the classic bulletin board. A blog is more like someone’s own book where each reader can comment on it. Both blogs and forums have their own purpose. Forums give a great deal of control and are highly interactive. However, unlike a blog they give rise to threaded discussions that may drift away from the original topic, therefore going down the proverbial rabbit trail. With blogs the content is more in control of one person or a team whom that one person has chosen. Reading someone’s personal blog may be compared to experiencing some type of voyeuristic thrill especially when reading about many of the personal subjects that bloggers may write about. Blogs, although starting out as solely personal diaries or journals have evolved much in the last few years. I have seen blogs arguing against the war in Iraq or for the war in Iraq. I have seen blogs about a person’s belief systems varying differently from my own. You name a subject, an interest, or a belief and I assure you that someone is blogging about it. One of the most recent advances is the use of blogs for Internet marketing purposes. As the evolution of blogs and blogging continues we will experience not only more personal blogs revealing information about their creators that maybe they should or shouldn’t reveal, but also more and more Internet marketers using blogs to further their business growth. Indeed in addition to the written word blogs today are also utilizing photography, audio files and even videos. Is it any wonder that blog is the buzzword of the day on the Internet? -------------------------- Keith P. Stieneke is an Internet marketer, a blogger and the creator of the new blog resource site BlogSmart-Resources.com
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