A timeline of Blogging

There is much deliberation about who actually posted the first ever blog, as people’s opinion on what a blog actually is are different. According to the Collins English Dictionary, the definition of a blog is: informal, a journal written on-line and accessible to users of the internet.

So even though some people consider Brian Redman, founder of ‘mod.ber’ (1983/1984), the first ever blogger, I disagree, because he created a newsgroup which wrote summaries on other threads and interesting postings and is not an actual journal.

Others grant the title to Brad Templeton, who founded the newsgroup ‘rec.humour.funny’. Again, as this not a journal, I do not agree that he is the first blogger, although he is considered to have the oldest existing blog/newsgroup, as ‘mod.ber’ closed after eight months.

However, both these newsgroups were accessible to users of the internet, even if it was before the World Wide Web, so it is understandable why some people consider them to be blogs.

In 1994, a student called Justin Hall began blogging about his personal life; many people consider him to be the first blogger. His blog, Justin’s links from the underground, has been running since 1994 and he is considered the ‘founding father of personal blogging’. Now, Justin is a freelance journalist and is now working on a project known as Gamelayers, Inc.

It wasn’t until 1997, that Steve Gibson was hired to blog full time by Ritual Entertainment, and is considered the first hired blogger. Also in 1997, John Barger came up with the term ‘weblog’, which bloggers from all over the world picked up and still use to this day.

Open Diary was launched in 1998, and enabled thousands of bloggers to read and comment on other people’s blogs. This was the first time comments could be submitted to blogs.

Brad Fitzpatrick, who is also known for being an early blogger, set up LiveJournal in March 1999. Also more blogging sites were being opened to catch the new market, including Pitas.com, which allows an easier alternative to maintaining a news page placed on a website, and Diaryland, which focused more on a personal diary community. Blogger was launched by Evan Willams and Meg Hourihan in August 1999; Google bought it off them in February 2003.

Peter Merholz, jokingly broke down the word ‘weblog’ to ‘we blog’ in his blog Peterme.com in 1999. It is now used as a term worldwide.

In 2001, mainly bloggers took to writing about politics, such as Andrew Sullivan, Taegan Goddard and Jerome Armstrong. Also, Schools of Journalism began to note the differences between Journalism and Blogging by research.

The Iraq war was a major issue and was addressed by blogs in 2002 and some bloggers expressed measured and passionate views. Some politicians, such as Howard Dean, used blogging to express their opinion on the Iraq war as well as other issues. People deem the Iraq war as the first ‘blog war’, as blogs got a wide readership. Some blogs were known as ‘war blogs’, and these allowed people to see different perspectives of the war, from both sides. Salam Pax, who was an Iraqi during the 2003 invasion, released a book of his blog, which still gets media attention.

Since 2004, politicians have used blogging to reach out to their voters and to form opinions on other matters. Newspapers and Television companies have used blogging to allow editors and readers to express their own opinions on political or trivial issues.

Natural disasters have also been spoken about in blogs, such as the 2004 Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, which allowed people to read about what the Main Stream Media hadn’t covered.

In 2007, Tim O’Reilly proposed to have a code of conduct for blogging.