The Internet boom has revolutionized our ways of communication and posting information to the online world. In the Nineties, electronic communities like the BBS and email lists became popular modes of communicating. They allowed one to post and receive articles and important information. Use net news groups were also favored as was proved by their shear numbers.
With the popularization of the world wide web however, everyone wanted his or her presence in this fascinating world. Thus came the millions of web pages. As people rushed to create their own web sites and online homes, another revolution loomed round the corner.
Web logs first started out from personal diaries, which were kept by people with a running account of their lives. These people called themselves diarists, journalists, journallers, or journalers. A few called themselves escribitionists.
There were many other forms of journals kept online. A notable example was game programmer John Carmack's widely read journal, published via the finger protocol.
Web sites, including both corporate sites and personal home pages, had and still often have "What's New" or "News" sections, often on the index page and sorted by date. This proved to be a big factor that led to web logs. One noteworthy early precursor to a blog was the tongue-in-cheek personal web site that was frequently updated by use net legend Kibo.
The term "web log" was used and first proposed by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997.
The word web log was again shortened by Peter Merholz to blogs. He used this term in 1999. Today, the word blog is a noun and to blog means to edit or post ones blog on the Internet.
Blogs were popularized in the late nineties by the appearance of new blogging technology and tools. Open Diary launched in October 1998, soon grew to thousands of online diaries. Open Diary innovated the reader comment, becoming the first blog community where readers could post their thoughts and views to various author's writings. The biggest was yet to come. Blogger.com as we know it today, was first started by Pyra Labs in 1999. It was bought over by the online giant google in 2003 and today, it leads the blogging communities.
Today, blogging software like word press and P machine have made it easy and attractive to own a small corner on the world wide web. All blogs include features like comments, where viewers can post their comments and thoughts in response to an author's article, track back where web sites can directly link to the article and permalink in which you can see the entire address of the full article.
In 2003, Dave Winer made a big contribution to the blog community.
He setup servers which web logs could ping to indicate updates. This just helped to make using these much simpler and easier in our everyday lives. |
