Sunday, August 12, 2007

Celebrating 10 good years of Blogging

Celebrating 10 years of blogging

Someone, somewhere started the first blog. There is consensus in the blogosphere that 1997 marked the birth of what has now become an online revolution.

In April that year, New Yorker Dave Winer kicked off a new kind of website. Though Winer's first entries on Scripting News were just a list of websites he had visited that day, it was the forerunner to the modern-day blog. On his site, Winer says Scripting News "bootstrapped the blogging revolution" and that it is the "longest currently running web log on the internet."

But the credit for actually using the term "web log" goes to Jorn Barger, a programmer. In December 1997, he created RobotWisdom.com which featured links to articles about politics, culture, books and technology that he found interesting. And like the present-day avatar of blogs, Barger even appended his own comments to some items.

Sometime in 1999, Peter Merholz of Peterme.com declared that he has decided "to pronounce the word 'weblog' as 'wee-blog'. Or 'blog' for short." It's also the year in which the word 'blog' first appears in print, acording to the Merriam-Webmaster dictionary.

Today, there are as many different kinds of blogs as there are human impulses - sex blogs, dating blogs, political blogs, technology blogs, music blogs...the list goes on. But 70 to 80% are still a variation on the personal diary. Number of blogs close to 100 million, according to Technorati. Every second, 14 blogs are added.

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