Blogs are the latest craze sweeping the internet, but have you ever wondered how blogs originated? In what must surely seem as the dark ages before blogs, people seeking the companionship of online communities were forced to rely mainly on mailing lists and bulletin boards for communication. By the 1990s, forums had made their appearance and allowed users to participate in conversations using ‘threads’, which were essentially areas of common interest.
Others seeking like-minded individuals would set up an online diary to share their thoughts and it is from this that the first blogs evolved. In fact, these pioneering blogs were termed ‘online diaries’ and made their appearance around 1994. However, it was three years before the term ‘blog’ was coined and the credit for that goes to Jorn Barger. At present, there are many different types of blogs. The most long-standing of these is still the online diary.
The earliest blogs were just another component of already established websites. These blogs were more suited to technologically advanced users and so weren’t widely accepted by the public. The advent of simple production and maintenance tools brought blogs to the masses, as it were. Now, blogs are easy to create, use and maintain. There are even specific services dedicated to hosting blogs. Alternatively blogs can be added to existing web hosting services using any of the plentiful blogging software available.
Some of the first hosted tools for blogs include LiveJournal, which opened its doors in 1999, and Open Diary, which carved a niche for itself at the time by being the first service to allow readers to post comments on users’ blogs. One of the biggest names in blogging is Blogger.com, which was becoming so recognized that it was bought over by Google in 2003.
Since this time, blogs have garnered increasing notice by mainstream media and groups. Blogs have taken an active role in breaking and spinning news, and are even being used by political candidates as a means of investigating public opinion and law enforcement agencies as a means of outreach.
Blogs have enjoyed an unparalleled popularity as illustrated by Xanga, which hosted a mere 100 blogs in 1997, only to have this number explode to 50 000 000 by December 2005. This may be due, in part, to the incredible versatility of blogs. They can be for practically any purpose and while typical blogs consist mainly of text, they can include photos and even videos.