Enter The Blogger

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.

Enter the blog software. It took many forms in its early days in the mid-1990s, often just allowing the blogger to post text entries day by day, still without any response capability from readers. Some of the earliest software did manage to create forums where "threads" could be created, people posting one after another on specified topics. But eventually programs developed that allowed readers to comment on a single diary-type entry, and this was when the real blogs began.

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.

In the short time since blogs were introduced, they have risen to prominence as entertainment gossip sites, pages where businesses connect with customers, sites for following people's favorite teams or athletes, and even sites for keeping an eye on politicians or where politicians can get their own messages out. The blogger appears to be the great communicator of the day. Whatever need anyone perceives, there will be someone on a blog to post an answer. And all the while, these blogs retain their original purpose for the majority of people by simply providing a diary site where they can post their thoughts, and where people can respond to them.

Related topics about blogger
World of Blogging
Do you have something to say and you want to get that message out to the rest of the world? It may be just some interesting facts about your life. It could be an informative article that helps others. It could also be an article that contains links to something you are selling or want to convince others to sell.

Can A Blog Help A Business?
Businesses do need to be cautious about raising customers' expectations, however. While an almost one-on-one relationship might be possible between a small business and its customers, larger companies may not be able to respond to all queries or complaints, and this could damage its reputation if it's not careful.

Celebrity Blogging
It's likely that these news blogs, perhaps better described as gossip blogs, came first, and that part of the reason celebrity blogs began to appear was in response to these, so the stars could take back some control of their image. But for a few years, blogs that gossiped about celebrities reigned supreme. This was no surprise, of course, since wildly popular newspaper tabloids like the National Enquirer and magazines like People had been serving a similar purpose for decades.