The Evo­lu­tion of the Blog: A Brief History

Chil­dren in the 21^st cen­tury have grown up with “blog­ging” as part of their every­day vocabulary.

For them, blogs have al­ways existed—Wikipedia has an ar­ti­cle about it, Mi­crosoft Word rec­og­nizes it as a le­git­i­mate word, and toss­ing around terms like “blog­ger” and “bl­o­gos­phere” in ca­sual con­ver­sa­tion doesn’t elicit ques­tions like it would have fif­teen years ago.

Chil­dren of the 90s wit­nessed the be­gin­ning of the blog, and the gen­er­a­tions of the new cen­tury are pro­gres­sively more tech savvy and so­cial media-oriented.

Where did all of this start? As a writer born be­fore the blog­ging phe­nom­e­non was con­ceived, the evo­lu­tion of the blog, so­cial me­dia, and on­line mar­ket­ing has be­come a source of in­tense per­sonal interest.

How does some­thing as ob­scure as a “per­sonal home­page” cre­ated by a col­lege stu­dent in 1994 be­come an in­te­gral part of the on­line community?

1962: J.C.R. Lick­lider of MIT be­gins to play with the idea of a “Galac­tic Net­work” that would al­low com­put­ers across the world to ac­cess the same data and pro­grams: the birth of the internet.

1990: The World Wide Web is cre­ated by Tim Bern­ers-Lee as the first in­ter­net browser.

1994: Blog­ging doesn’t be­gin (ac­cord­ing to pop­u­lar opin­ion) un­til Justin Hall, a stu­dent at Swarth­more Col­lege, de­cides to cre­ate one of the first on­line di­aries: link.net. Other blogs emerge slowly in this same time pe­riod, but Justin is widely re­garded as a pi­o­neer in the blog­ging community.

1997: In De­cem­ber, Jorn Barger names Justin’s on­line di­ary and oth­ers that fol­low “weblogs”, short for “log­ging the web”.

1999: Pe­ter Mer­holz, a founder of Adap­tive Path, short­ens “weblog” to “blog” on his own per­sonal blog, Peterme.com. Jesse James Gar­rett counts 23 to­tal blogs on the in­ter­net. Evan Williams and Meg Houri­han from Pyra Labs cre­ate Blog­ger, and a se­ries of more user-friendly blog­ging sites be­gins to emerge.

2000: Bo­ing Bo­ing hits the web and be­comes a link di­rec­tory. It wins “Best Blog” in both 2004 and 2005.

2002: The word “blog” is in­cluded in the Ox­ford Eng­lish Dictionary.

2003: Word­Press is cre­ated. It will be­come the most used blog­ging software.

2004: The “year of the video blog”.

2005: The video blog is closely fol­lowed by the launch of YouTube.

2006: From hum­ble be­gin­nings in 1999, the blog count reaches 50 million.

2007: The cre­ation of Tum­blr, a tum­blog that com­bines the so­cial net­work­ing of twit­ter with a more tra­di­tional blog­ging ex­pe­ri­ence. By Oc­to­ber 2013, it grows to host 146 mil­lion blogs.

2010: Blog count on the web reaches 125 million.

2011: Google+ hits the web. Im­ple­men­ta­tion of Google au­thor­ship will be a ma­jor point for blogs. Some blog­gers con­sider giv­ing up their blogs and blog on Google Plus instead.

2012: Blog­ging be­comes in­creas­ingly in­ter­twined with so­cial me­dia. Re­spon­sive web de­sign is get­ting pop­u­lar as more and more users are ac­cess­ing the web via mo­bile. Also, more blog­gers are us­ing ex­ter­nal com­ment­ing sys­tems for bet­ter so­cial me­dia integration.

2013: Fol­low­ing Google’s Panda, Pen­guin, and Hum­ming­bird up­dates Con­tent Mar­ket­ing gets a boost and many busi­nesses are adding blog­ging to their mar­ket­ing mix. In 2 op­pos­ing trends there’s a huge in­crease in mi­cro blog­ging with im­ages and su­per short videos, while many text based blog­gers write in­creas­ingly longer blog posts.

Blog­ging Today

Blogs be­gan back in the 90s as on­line jour­nals that were few and far between.

They be­came main­stream mid-2000s and are now used for jour­nal­ing, net­work­ing, so­cial me­dia, mar­ket­ing, ad­ver­tis­ing, news sources, and a host of other pur­poses. There are video blogs, pod­casts, mi­croblog­ging, au­to­mated blogs, SEO blogs, and per­sonal blogs that are only read by close fam­ily and friends.

Peo­ple blog for ed­u­ca­tional, per­sonal, and busi­ness pur­poses. Tum­blr, Twit­ter, Face­book, Word­Press, and Blog­ger are all de­scen­dants of that first blog post in 1994.

One sig­nif­i­cant change in the evo­lu­tion of the blog is the shift from on­line per­sonal jour­nal en­tries to be­com­ing a ma­jor player in on­line mar­ket­ing cam­paigns. In the age of the in­ter­net, blog­gers post links to web­sites that pro­mote prod­ucts and ser­vices for their read­ers to browse. Com­pa­nies use meth­ods like pay per click ad­ver­tis­ing that only charges ad­ver­tis­ers every time their ad is clicked, fo­cused key­words to spe­cific au­di­ences, and hir­ing SEO com­pa­nies to pro­mote their name on the web.

Pro­mot­ing ser­vices and prod­ucts on­line is the new way to reach the wider world, and blog­ging has be­come per­haps ir­re­triev­ably linked with mar­ket­ing. Blog­ging is so pop­u­lar and in­te­gral in the mar­ket­ing world that many com­pa­nies now cre­ate “fake” blogs sim­ply geared to­wards pro­mot­ing their products.

Blog­ging in the Future

Where will blog­ging go next? It has been al­most two decades since that first blog post from a col­lege stu­dent at Swarth­more Col­lege, and the blog con­tin­ues to evolve. “Vlogs” and pod­casts have slowly risen in pop­u­lar­ity, with more peo­ple choos­ing to use mul­ti­me­dia to in­form and en­ter­tain their audiences.

Per­sonal blogs are free, easy to cre­ate, and read­ily ac­ces­si­ble from a num­ber of sources (a far cry from the days when you had to know html and cod­ing to write your own blog).

Peo­ple can now make a liv­ing as pro­fes­sional bloggers.

In 1994, no one could have pre­dicted where the bl­o­gos­phere would be in twenty years.

The same is likely true of blog­ging today—in twenty years we will be in a very dif­fer­ent place than we are now. The only thing we can know for sure is that it will have evolved. Af­ter all, the only true con­stant is change. And that state­ment is never more true than when tech­nol­ogy and mul­ti­me­dia are involved.