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!