Which came first, the blogger or the blogging site? When the internet began to spread in the 1990s, online communities were already gathering around common interests, using things like email lists and electronic bulletin boards to communicate. But these were “back door” methods not easily connected to the new web pages, and the personal interactions were clunky and mechanical. People wanted something more like a diary which could record their thoughts and allow people to respond. The question was how to make this possible.
This was where the software for blogging entered the picture. It built slowly up from simple beginnings, where the blogger made frequent entries but still couldn’t receive any responses. One form of the software made a quantum leap ahead when forums could be created that allowed people to make sequential posts in a “thread” that followed a particular topic. But once software emerged that allowed daily diary-style entries with the capacity for people to comment on each entry, then real modern blogs became possible.
While 1998 was the year the world first saw a blogging site as it’s known today (Open Diary, established in October), the big year for blogging seems to have been 1999, since it witnessed the debut of sites like LiveJournal, Pitas.com, Diaryland, and the well-known www.blogger.com site. Even the word “blog” was coined in this year. It was a shortened form of “weblog,” first used in 1997 by Jorn Barger on his “Robot Wisdom Weblog.” In 1999, Peter Merholz broke the word down to the phrase “we blog,” and finally Evan Williams at Pyra Labs popularized the use 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 way. In 2003, WordPress, another major site, was introduced, based on open source blogging software. As blogging grew in popularity, the use and value of blogs became more and more apparent, and in more realms than anyone had dreamt of being possible. Political, news, business, and home business blogs are just a few that quickly come to mind.
Blogs are now entertainment sites, gossiping about famous people. Company websites might include a blog for communicating with customers. Blogs spring news that can make or break politicians, the writers functioning as a new type of journalist. The blogger is king, digging for information, giving tips, connecting helpers with those who need them. Whatever type of connection people want, there are blogs to provide it. And more than any of that, they still serve the function that they were originally designed for, which is providing a diary site where people can record their thoughts and hear what others have to say about them.
Blogging is an extremely popular pastime in recent years, and one of the fastest-growing kinds of sites is the celebrity blog. While it may sometimes be written by a publicity person, frequently a blog like this is composed by the actual celebrities. Yet the vast majority of blogs covering famous people are written not by the stars, but by the fans who follow them or by professional gossips who make a living talking about them.
This may not be a good thing. Celebrity blogs might already have turned civil society into something much less civil, a nation of gossipers unjustifiably prying into the private lives of their fellow citizens, however infamous they are. Even formerly responsible news organizations now include gossip about celebrities in their papers and newscasts. Bloggers who pry into the lives of the stars may now be the “journalists” of the world, to the detriment of well-researched and reliable news.
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