Which came first, the blogger or the blogging site? When the web started to spread in the 1990s, online communities were already gathering around common interests, using avenues like e-mail lists and electronic bulletin boards to communicate. But these were “back door ” strategies not simply hooked up to the new web pages, and the private interactions were clunky and mechanical. Individuals wanted something more like a diary which could record their thoughts and permit folk to reply. The issue was the right way to make this practical.
Enter the blog software. It took many forms in its early days in the mid-1990s, regularly just permitting the blogger to post text entries day by day, still without any reply capacity from readers. Some of the earliest software did manage to form forums where “threads” could be created, folks posting one after another on various topics. But ultimately programs developed that allowed readers to comment on a single diary-type entry, and this was when the real blogs commenced.
While 1998 was the year the world first saw a blogging site as it’s known today (Open Diary, established in October), the gigantic year for blogging seems to have been 1999, since it saw the debut of sites like LiveJournal, Pitas.com, Diaryland, and the well known blogger.com site. Even the word “blog ” was coined at that time. It was a shortened word for “weblog, “first used in 1997 by Jorn Barger on his “Robot knowledge Weblog. ” In 1999, Peter Merholz broke the word down to the phrase “we blog,” and ultimately Evan Williams at Pyra laboratories popularized the utilization of “a blog” as a noun, and “to blog” as a verb.
Once multi-member blogging sites were established, the phenomenon took off in a big fashion. In 2003, WordPress, another major site, was introduced, based mostly on open source blogging software. As blogging grew in popularity, the use and value of blogs became more and more obvious, and in more realms than anybody had thought would be possible.
Blogs are now entertainment sites, gossiping about famous people. Company and home-based business web sites might include a blog for communicating with clients. Blogs spring stories that can make or break officeholders, the writers working as a new sort of correspondent. The blogger is king, digging for info, giving tips, connecting assistants with individuals that need them. Whatever sort of connection people want, there are blogs to provide it. And more than any of that, they continue to serve the function that they were initially designed for, which is providing a diary site where people can record their thoughts and hear what others have to say about them.