An Overview of the History of Blogging

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Foreword By The Editor

Blogging has become incredibly popular over recent years and there are many reasons why this is so. Among them are the convenience of publishing on the web in real time, the ‘daily journal’ format, the way that most blog platforms can be enhanced simply through the use of plugins, superior search engine optimization, and so on. It is interesting though, to read about how blogs evolved and that’s what this article by David Menagu is all about.

Mike Alexander
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The Many Roles Of Blogging

In case you still don’t know it, blogging has played a very important role in many areas of modern life, including even politics, and this is true of almost every country in the world. If you are looking for news and information, blogs are a very handy source.

If you want to know more about blogging, just look into its history. Before blogs became popular online, digital communities came in many forms including Usenet, commercial online services like BiX, Genie and CompuServe, ‘bulletin boards’ (BBS), and email lists. By the ninetees, WebEx was able to create running conversations. They used ‘threads’ which served as topical connections. Some say that blogging is just like the 20th century’s project on Mass Observation.

Early Moves

Brian Redman managed mod.ber which was created in 1983. He and some of his associates posted interesting summaries of threads and postings that took place at different places on the Internet. It has been strongly likened to a blog because of the style in journal publishing used. The posted summaries also contained links to cool and other interesting places chosen by a particular blogger. Unfortunately, mod.ber no longer operated after about eight months.

The First Bloggers

Blogs are like online diaries because they often tell about the personal lives of the bloggers themselves. The writers often call themselves journalers, journalists, or diarists, and escribitionists. Journal communities are now present online in great numbers, especially nowadays. One of the earliest bloggers known in history was Brad Fitzpatrick. Jerry Pournelle and Justin Hall were also early bloggers. Way back in 1994, there was an early blog which combined text, pictures, and video and was transmitted live using an EyeTap device and a wearable computer.

The first ever hired blogger was Steve Gibson and his blogs together with that of Stephen Heaslip evolved from John Carmack plans. Carmack was a game programmer who published a popular journal through ‘finger protocol’. Ritual Entertainment hired Gibson in February 1997.

The term blog was first used by P. Merholz by breaking the word weblog to ‘we blog’. Later on, blog was adopted as a verb and a noun. When you say ‘to blog’, it means to post or to edit a weblog.

Private And Business Use

You can find both personal homepages and corporate sites that contain blogs. Oftentimes, these sites have news and ‘What’s New’ sections. Drudge Report is a very good example of a weblog that focuses on news. It was founded by Matt Drudge, a maverick reporter. In 1998 the Institute of Public Accuracy began posting news-pegged quotes, usually of one paragraph, and released them a number of times each week. ‘Tongue-in-Cheek’ was also a noted blog precursor updated by Kibo, a Usenet legend.

Blogging Today

Blogs recognized by people today are produced through a distinct class of online publishing platform. Thanks to the evolution of tools used in the production, facilitation, and maintenance of web articles, this publishing process was soon adopted by a larger and less than technically savvy populace. There are now a lot of hosting services available exclusively for blogs and they are run through the use of blog software. Some examples are Movable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal, Blogger, and many other regular hosting services on the web.

Nowadays blogs play a very important role online since many political candidates, political consultants, and news services use them. Many blogs are opinion forming and can effectively allow the blogger to bond with his desired audience. Blogging is already part of the web’s infinite number of online services and many people are using them in many different ways. How about you, do you want to become a blogger? Climb aboard!

About The Author

I just posted Blogging for Money and Make Money Through Blogging on my blog. Read them now!

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