Weblogs celebrate 10 years
By Leah McBride Mensching, Tuesday 18 December 2007 at 22:48 :: World Digital Media Trends :: #997 :: rss
Jorn Barger coined the term “weblog” 10 years ago to describe his Robot Wisdom site, in which he logged interesting Web sites. A decade later, blog monitoring site Technorati is currently tracking more than 70 million weblogs, including everything from personal online diaries to breaking news sections of online newspapers.
Barger became the first official weblogger on Dec. 17, 1997, and in 1998, the blogosphere still only consisted of about 23 sites. In 1999, the idea began to grow, and the word “blog” began to be used as a shortened form of “weblog.”
Today, Technorati reports there are about 120,000 new blogs created every day, and 1.5 million posts are added to blogs each day – that's about 17 posts per second, according to BBC News.
Rising out of blogging has come the wave of social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.
Blogs are the “easiest, cheapest, fastest publishing tool ever invented,” Jeff Jarvis, head of the interactive journalism programme at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, told Wired magazine. “The people have a voice they didn't have before,” said Jarvis, also a BuzzMachine journalism blog writer and SFN contributing author.
Jarvis credits blogs for opening up lines of communication between citizens and otherwise unreachable figures.
“The public can find themselves in a dialogue with politicians and leaders that simply wasn't possible before,” he said. “(Blogging is) a tool that you can use to do anything. Change the world or put up your restaurant's daily menu, and anything in between.”
Today, blogs are no longer just personal online diaries. They now have an important place in every information niche, including in politics, entertainment, publishing and news.
Matt Drudge's news blog Drudge Report, for example, received national recognition in the United States when Drudge covered the Bill Clinton – Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. Drudge Report has a huge following, and in 2006, Drudge, once a store clerk at a convenience store, was named one of Time Magazine's most influential people in the world.
Bloggers are the “pit bulls of journalism,” Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of online news site The Huffington Post, told Wired. “Blogging at its best is deeply personal, and once readers get used to that kind of connection to a writer, it's hard for them to accept anything less.”
Problems in the print sector have caused the newspaper industry to increasingly turn to online and mobile, leading blogs to grow and multiply under the brand names of newspapers, such as the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog. More and more newspapers are betting that their quality brand names, combined with the increasing popularity and prominence of blogs, will pay off.
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