The rise of blogging

As I already mentioned last Friday, I’m on holiday! Goodbye Switzerland, hello Venezuela :) On the flight over I read in Jonathan Yang’s “The Rough Guide to Blogging” about the rise of blogging. Here a summary:

Before blogging became popular, personal homepages were the outlet of choice for individuals who wanted to create an online presence. Some homepages performed similar functions to today’s blogs, but the big difference was that the site’s owner needed to have at least a basic grasp of HTML to revise the homepage - more on HTML in one of my next posts, I promise :) That was a high enough barrier to put off most non-techies.

This all changed when easy-to-use blogging tools hit the scene: A blog could be updated from any computer without any specific programming knowledge. The first free publishing service was Pitas arising in July 1999, with Blogger and others following shortly after that. The first blog portal was created by Brigitte Eaton (www.eatonweb.com) to help readers find good blogs. Soon hundreds of thousands of blogs appeared. They were mostly by journal bloggers (writing about nothing more than the things going on in their lives: boring job, raising child etc.) and pundit bloggers (writing opinions about politics, movies, technology, world events and other specific subjects). These pundit bloggers served as hubs for communities of like-minded Internet users, before other specific communities existed.

By mid-2001 blogging as an activity was gaining momentum, but the public attention was still quite limited. This changed on September 11, 2001. The shock created an immediate demand for continuous coverage of the terrorist attacks and its consequences, which didn’t seem to be covered enough by the traditional media. The aftermath of the attacks pushed bloggers further into the spotlight, with “warblogs” discussing political and military developments.
With more and more professional and amateur pundits staking their claims online, politicians and media personalities suddenly had to deal with a new pack of independent watchdogs. The power of the pundit bloggers was remarkable.
As the new millennium rolled on, more different kind of people joined the blogosphere. Businesses started adding blogs to their websites to improve relations; consumer blogs started highlighting and reviewing products and so on. Blogging became the new bottom-up channel for distributing news and other information, challenging traditional media and influencing trends.
Now, by the beginning of 2007, even people like me are joining the blogosphere; posting entries from a really slow computer on the roof of our hotel in venezuela. Quite a cultural phenomenon, isn’t it?
Dania