Adv. Comp.: Background on Blogging for Purposes of Writing Your Own Posts Part 1

During the course of the semester, I will ask you to add entries to your "Research Blog" -- the first entry regarding your Editorial is forthcoming soon.  In order to write quality entries, I find it appropriate to know something about the history of blogging and understand who (or maybe what) is influential in the "blogosphere." 

The term blog was coined in 1997 by internet phenom and self-made, Chicago writer Jorn Barger who frequently "logged the web" or "web-logged" in his early uber-blog "Robot Wisdom." (Later, the longer iteration, "web-log" was simply shortened to "blog.")  

Barger named the new writing style, but its first practitioner (of repute) was another Chicago native Justin Hall. Hall started an online diary. "Justine's Links from the Underground" in 1994 while attending Swarthmore College.  Hall still actively blogs (and how cool is it that his site url is, simply, links.net?).

Hall, along with others, were simply prolific, "web-site-updaters" during a time when web-authoring required some, at least, rudimentary knowledge of coding and the use of FTP, and, during the period of internet development between 1994 and 1999 Hall and his compatriots were more or less writing, rewriting, and overwriting HTML files.  Think of this process as writing, rewriting, and overwriting a Word doc., say, that you send via email to the same people over and over again each week.

However, in the late 1990s, improvements to software (or more aptly internet browser functionality) coupled with improvements in the stability of the internet, led to actual "posting" or "logging" capabilities, and the era of the ubiquitous WYSIWYG was born.  One of the earliest iterations of this newer technology, launched in 1999, was blogger.com from Pyra labs, and, in an endorsement of the future-leaning of blogging itself, internet colossus Google purchased blogger.com a mere four years later in 2003.

From 1999/2000 until about 2009, or roughly the first ten years of broader appeal and increasing use, blogging was generally an individual writing activity.  However, now, most influential bloggers are part of "multi-author blogs" (MAB) like "The Huffington Post," "Mental Floss," "Talking Points Memo," and "Gawker."  Also, most major, traditional newspapers have bloggers or use blogging as part of their general news reporting; David Pogue, a technology writer for The New York Times, is an excellent example of a traditional newspaper columnist who has adapted to the only-slightly-different-pose of a blogger. 

Many have commented on the increasingly useless game of labeling web-based writing as either "journalism" or merely "blogging."  The prolific and highly influential Andrew Sullivan, formerly of the MAB "The Daily Beast" has made a notable career eschewing traditional print forms altogether.