Happy Anniversary to Blogging! I think…
Mar 21st, 2007 by msdanielle
I read this article recently that says blogging is now 10 years old. Ten years ago, I was in college, and I barely knew how to turn on a computer, let alone keep a blog. I didn’t know what blogging was, like most people. It wasn’t until very recently that I even became curious about it. Now that it’s consuming all my available time(!), I guess I should take a step back to see how it started.
The authors of the article, Declan McCullough and Anne Broache, basically question who is the actual “first blogger,” asking:
Was the first blogger the irascible Dave Winer? The iconoclastic Jorn Barger? Or was the first blogger really Justin Hall, a Web diarist and online gaming expert whom The New York Times Magazine once called the “founding father of personal blogging”?
Essentially, everyone can agree that a blog contains posts listed in chronological order, with the most recent ones listed at the top. Most of them also contain links to other resources that the blogger likes. But I find the core of this article especially interesting (Who’s the first blogger?), considering the narcissistic nature of blogs themselves. They’re virtual egos, and trying to pinpoint the grandfather of them all might seem petty to those of us who’ve recently joined the bandwagon, but could possibly be the biggest ego-booster of them all to whoever founded them. After reading the article, it seemed to me like everyone named equally contributed to the early development stages of blogging. They just might not have been calling them “blogs.”
What do you guys think? Does it really matter who was the “first” blogger? Is there a more exact definition than “posts listed in reverse chronology”? And if the first blogger wasn’t Barger, is blogging really 10 years old?
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Great post! Didn’t know it was blogging’s birthday! But I think regardless of who the grandfather is, blogging owes a lot of its popularity to 21-year old Matt Mullenweg, the creator of Wordpress – one of the youngest and most influential people on the net!
Oops, He’s 23 now – still young though.
I’m not sure that it is all that important who the *first* blogger was because I question the accuracy of that anyway. I’m sure there are people that were doing what we consider blogging but just not doing it publicly or with much notoriety, so how can anyone really be certain who was first.
I agree with Jon that the creation of Wordpress was a key milestone for blogging as it made it so much easier for people to get into it.
actually . . i would have to say that the creation of blogger.com is the key to the explosion in blogging . . . i just want to give credit where credit is due . . . . Mullenweg just took the idea another step . .
Danielle, have you considered adding the “Subscribe to Comments” plugin to notify readers of new comments on a post? It helps bring people back to posts and I have found it to help increase the commenting on my sites. Just an idea for you.
i thought about that – i don’t think i have it. i think i’ll add that and i’m still trying to figure out myavatars. can’t figure out where to put the code… i’m not so tech savvy…
I just added the MyAvatars plug-in, since you have Threaded Comments like me, the code can go either before or after
inside the write_comment function in comments.phpugh.. filtered out my code..
before or after:
Ah, you can delete my other comments…
Last try…
Code goes before or after: comment_text()
no way dude… these comments are staying up!
hehe…
thanks for the tip!
I agree with Gary in that Blogger.com was what made blogging so popular. I started blogging in 2002 because of b=Blogger.com and at that time, I don’t know if WordPress was around but I hadn’t heard of them.
Danielle, if you can get myavatars.com working, lemme know cuz I thought I put it up correctly but no pictures show up next to the comments =P
I started at the end of last year and Blogger was where I began. It was the easiest way to get online and start blogging I found then. As I did it a couple months I became aware of Wordpress, which honestly I had never heard of to that point. Now I use WP on my blogs for the most part because of what they offer for us on our own domains.
I look at Blogger as my “practice” blogs, but they are great for someone that doesn’t plan to really get into blogging like most of us are. The simple Adsense integration there gives anyone the ability to start making a few pennies online immediately.
great idea.