What is a blog and where did blogging come from? Here are some brief highlights on the road trip that has been The [We]Blog(osphere).
History
According to NPR.org's special series "The Evolution of the Blog," particularly the article "Timeline: The Life of the Blog," the roots of what we today see as "any page with frequent short posts in reverse chronological order" go back to ancient times if you consider personal journals and professional logs.
According to NPR.org's special series "The Evolution of the Blog," particularly the article "Timeline: The Life of the Blog," the roots of what we today see as "any page with frequent short posts in reverse chronological order" go back to ancient times if you consider personal journals and professional logs.
Interestingly, the blogs we see today often mix the two descriptors: personal and professional. Some histories of the blog begin all the way back in the 60s with the introduction of the first internet. John Barger is generally credited, however, with the coinage of the word "weblog" in 1997 with his daily blog "Robot Wisdom WebLog." The website is no longer active. |
Blogworld.com's article "The History of Blogging: 12 Years of Blogs" cites 1999 as a big year in blogging history for the following reasons:
- Blogger Peter Merholz took Barger's word "weblog" and split it into "we blog" as a joke.
- Evan Williams (founder of Pyra Labs, who began Blogger) began to use "blog" as a noun and verb.
- Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal, which would serve as another blogging platform.
- The first version of RSS is released for Netscape, enabling blog subscription.
User-Generated Content
As we read about in Hinton & Hjorth's Understanding Social Media, the development of the Web at this time and going forward is characterized by the easing of user-generated content with the growth of freely distributed platforms. LiveJournal, Wordpress, and Blogger are a few that came out near or shortly after this time.
As we read about in Hinton & Hjorth's Understanding Social Media, the development of the Web at this time and going forward is characterized by the easing of user-generated content with the growth of freely distributed platforms. LiveJournal, Wordpress, and Blogger are a few that came out near or shortly after this time.
By 2007, according to the NPR.org article above, the blog search engine Technorati was reporting 112 million blogs worldwide. Blogging.org released an interesting infographic in 2012 with more statistics, counting 152 million blogs worldwide at that time. But this number is likely to fluctuate depending on your definition, which may or may not include such platforms such as Twitter (microblogging).
My Blog Recommendations
The two blogs I recommend are actually vlogs, which do the same thing blogs do but in a video format. Vlogs are just one more benchmark in the short and dynamic history of the medium.
The two blogs I recommend are actually vlogs, which do the same thing blogs do but in a video format. Vlogs are just one more benchmark in the short and dynamic history of the medium.
Produced by Mike Rugnetta under the umbrella of PBS, the Idea Channel is a weekly vlog performing great cultural criticism with the help of animated GIFs out the wazoo and plenty of the quick and witty monologue-ing that characterizes many vlogs. | |
Novelist John Green and his musician-writer-producer brother Hank post weekly vlogs that are written and filmed individually as if they were in response to each other. They have a massive following and in addition to the main Vlog Brothers channel, they have collaborated with other producers to make a number of spinoffs and educational vlogs in other categories. | |