2A Brief History of Blogs
So what is a“blog” anyway? Blogs can be personal or business related. Business blogs or corporate blogs are one of the hottest growth areas for blogs, and they’re opening new markets for business. Blogs allow anyone to quickly post text and images to the Web without any special technical knowledge. This opens the web up to more publishing and distribution of information.
What is it?
Blog is short for weblog. A blog is a regularly updated journal published on the web. Wouldn’t it be nice if the readers of a website could leave comments, about a specific article? With blogs, they can! Posting comments is one of the best features of blogs. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or the Web site.
Some blogs are intended for a small audience; others have a readership of national newspapers. On a blog, the content consists of articles— also sometimes called“posts” or“entries.”
A blog is a web site that contains dated entries in reverse chronological order (most recent first) about a particular topic. A blog has unfiltered content— some feel that the second somebody filters or edits the author it’s no longer a blog.
Figure 2-1 Author’s blog showing the major elements of a typical blog posting.
Blogs are influential, personal, or both, and they reflect as many topics and opinions as there are people writing them. Many blogs focus on a particular topic, such as web design, politics, sports, or mobile technology. Some are more eclectic, presenting links to all manner of other sites. And others are more like personal journals, presenting the author’s daily life and thoughts.
The Origins and History of Blogs
So when did blogging begin? Although blogs are a recent invention, the idea is not new. Blogs evolved from online diaries that people kept from the earliest days of the Internet. Blogs, as we think of them today, are a combination of a personal journal, a message board and a news site. Let’s look at the milestones of blogging.
1994– It is uncertain who started the very first blog. Justin Hall is credited by some to be the“founding father” of blogging for starting his“Proto-Blog” in December 1994 while still a student at Swarthmore College. Justin maintained this online journaling for 11 years.
1997 Jorn Barger first used the term“web log” to describe a simple website where people post interesting links that they found while surfing the net.
1998 Open Diary launched their website which would grow to thousands. Open Diary is credited with adding the ability for readers to make comments
1999 Peter Merholz jokingly broke weblog apart into“We Blog.” This was quickly adopted and shortened to blog. Blog became adopted as both a noun and a verb. LiveJournal and Blogger.com were launched as the first hosted blog tools.
2002 Heather Armstrong was fired for discussing her job in her personal blog which was named“Dooce.” Dooced becomes the term that means“Fired for blogging.”
2004 Merriam-Webster, the prominent dictionary publisher, announced that“Blog” was the word of the year.
2004 marked a turning point where blogging became adopted into everyday life.
2007 There were over 100 million blogs being tracked. Millions of people look to blogs as their source for information, news or just a good laugh.
Blogs have become a driving force in the grass roots breaking and shaping of news stories. An example is“Rathergate” where Dan Rather presented documents on 60 Minutes that conflicted with accepted accounts of President Bush’s service records. Bloggers declared these documents forgeries and applied extreme pressure to CBS. This exposed reporting irregularities that lead to a public CBS apology.
RSS (Real Simple Syndication)
RSS is at the heart of what makes a blog work. Remember, a blog is a special website that allows easy web publi
