History of Blogging

Over the past few years blogging has been added to almost everyone's dictionary, from your classmates to your grandmothers. With this being the case, however, most people still do not know where this phenomenon came from. To answer this question efficiently, one must start from the beginning. Before blogging, the online community communicated through a few different mediums, from Usenet (the original forum service), Bulletin Board System (BBS, the original online community), to today's common day forum. While these forms of communication worked efficiently enough, with the advancements of technology (specifically the invention of HTTP and the Internet), and a new outlook on how these services are to be used (quicker and simpler), new varieties including blogging were developed.

A blog itself isn't a service or software like Usenet or mIRC is. "A blog (a contraction of the term "web log") is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video" ( Wikipedia - Blog ). With this in mind, the actual act of blogging was invented initially from an online diary. The 'original' bloggers were journalists, writers, and everyday people who voluntarily chose to share their opinions with the world. Considered to be one of the earliest bloggers, Justin Hall was just a student of Swarthmore College and in 1994 began eleven years of personal blogging. During the early years, blogging was not known as so, but was typically regular webpage updates of the "News" or "What's New" sections and was indexed on the webserver for future readings. Blogging continued like this until tools were developed specifically to make this process easier, quicker, more proficiently organized, and streamlined.

The term 'weblog' was first coined in December of 1997 by Jorn Barger and the shortened version 'blog' we use today was jokingly added to the sidebar of Peter Merholz's website in April 1999. From here blogging quickly spread from the creations of the first blogging webtools Open Diary and LiveJournal were among the first widely used blogging tools and still exist today. Blogger.com was another one of these original blogging tools and was actually purchased by the mega giant Google in February 2003. Since the days of early blogging many new reasons to blog have become popular, as well as public's overall view of blogging credibility. Now many politicians are using blogs to help campaign, music artists are spreading word of new albums, how-to manuals are being written, and even TV news networks like CNN are posting the latest worldwide news and events. Blogging has even become so mainstream that fine universities like Eastern Michigan University are building their usage into everyday criteria for classes.