Archive for the ‘History of Blogging’ Category
The History of Blogging 2
The History of Blogging; 2001 and Beyond
On this history of blogging page, we’ll cover blogs from 2001 and up to the present. (Here’s the other blogging history page, covering up to 2000.)
The Stage is Set: 2001–2004
American blogs hit the scene in 2001. Around this time we started seeing the blogging how to manuals. Another funny thing schools of journalism started looking at what was different between blogging an journalism.
Starting in 2002 we started seeing blogs about Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. This created some problems by some of the things said when bloggers broke the story to the media. Bloggers start a political problem that caused Lott to step down as the Majority Leader.
For some strange reason this gave some credibility to blogs as having the real story. But it is the bloggers that light the way to the public and the mainstream media. It also works the other way around with the bloggers adding to the stories of the mainstream media.
By 2002 blogs are breaking and shaping the stories of the day. Back then the bloggers created their own view points on the Iraq war. Making something different than the left-right and political views.
Going back to the second war in Iraq you could say it was the first blog war.
Bloggers of Iraq got a big readership. We even had blogs started by soldiers in the war. We even got a new word “warblog” presented people with another first hand view to the realities. The public got for the first time a very different viewpoint from the official sources of news.
An almost instant commentary provided by bloggers on televised events. This process was referred to as “liveblogging” kind of a real-time commentary.
The History of Blogging: 2004–present
Starting about 2004 blogs become the main source of political consultants and candidates. The new services available and popularity allowed them to be used to form both popular and unpopular opinions.
By 2004 in the summer the Republican and Democratic Parties bloggers blogs turned into a standard publicity tool. The high profile commentators on television created their own blogs. In 2004 Merriam Webster’s Dictionary claimed “blog” as the word of the year.
It was a blog that brought to light “Rathergate”. Bloggers brought evidence to prove the documents Dan Rather used to “prove” his news report were forgeries.
Blogs have become the primary news sources some of the high profile cases were the Tsunami of Dec 2004. Another was Hurricane Katrina Aug 2005.
Fortune magazine provided information on a number of blogs the people in business just could not ignore.Code of conduct for Bloggers was suggested by Tim O’Reilly in 2007.
2008 and On: The Future of Blogging?
There had been speculation that blogs will have reached their highest numbers in 2007. The thought process was that more and more people were building websites as opposed to blogs. And also, the rate of “dead” blogs would offset new blogs. So far, there’s not any indication that blog building is slowing down. In fact, many people add blogs to their website!
In addition to the text blogging we know, podcasting (audio blogs) and vlogs (video blogs) are getting more and more popular.
Where will the history of blogging be in another 5 years? Given the rate of technology growth, you can be sure of one thing; it won’t be what we predict today!
History of Blogging
The history of blogging starts back further than most people realize. Although modern blogging has been around for at least 9 years, the origins were way back, before PCs became a familiar item.
Before the Beginning: 1983–1990
Back in the early days we had something called Usenet, a serial medium. It had a newsgroup that was moderated. CompuServe was also one of the original newsgroups that became popular.
The posting in the newsgroup was in the control of a single individual of group. These newsgroups were really just moderated discussions. Still, they were the forerunners of today’s blogging (as well as user forums).
The History of Blogging and the First Real Blogs: 1994–2001
What happened was the old online diary that people would keep track of their personal things kind of turned into the blog we know today. The old writers of the online diaries had many different names they called themselves. For example, they would describe themselves as diarists, journalists, journalers and even escribitionists!
Very early on, weblogs meant tracking the updates to a website. What happened over time was that new tools allowed the automatic posting of articles on the web, in a reverse chronological order. This made it simple for the average person, so anyone could get in on the action. This is what came to be known as the blogs we have today.
One of the oldest weblogs is Scripting News, started in 1997, and still going strong today! Take a look back at some of the posts from way back when — they are fascinating.
Here is one I hadn’t heard of as an early blog. Called Wearable Wireless Webcam (no longer in operation), it consisted of someone’s personal life being recorded with text, live pictures and video. They used a wearable computer devise called an EyeTap to transmit the pictures and video live. This type of blogging got a new name “sousveillance” combining the video and text into a journal, some of which were used as evidence for legal matters.
Jorn Barger, in December 1997, came up with the term “weblog”. And now the person the originated the “blog” started it as a joke by making the phrase we blog on a weblog he called Peterme.com sometime in 1999. It stuck as the new noun meaning of the weblog and meant to post to your weblog.
Although off to a slow start, people picked up on blogging very fast. In 1999 what helped was the first of the hosted blog tools. This helped blogging grow in popularity.
You ready for more? Check out the next history of blogging page where we’ll talk about the years 2001 to present…and beyond!
