Week 13: 10 years since blogs took off

Posted on October 14th, 2007 by kmburb.
Categories: Uncategorized.

I read an article over the weekend about how the evolution of blogs can be traced back to December 17, 1997 when John Barger first came up with the name “weblog” to describe his online list of favourite websites. In 1999, by which time weblog had become blog, there were only about a 100 known bloggers producing their own sites. Now there are more than 94 million blogs, with hundreds of new blogs, vlogs, phlogs and moblogs popping up every few minutes.

It is fascinating to look back over a relatively short time and see just how much has changed, and how quickly, as people around the world adopt the web more fully into their lives. This really raises big questions about how much more change the next 10 years alone will see, and also how much further uptake of current and future technologies and forms of communication there will be.

The universal adoption of blogs also shows how people are now aware that there is a forum in which they can communicate with the world, without any of the barriers they face with traditional media forms. Many bloggers have gone on the write books or been asked to write columns for papers and magazines, so the little old (10 years now!) blog has grown up to become the launch pad of much bigger things, as well as a revolutionary communication medium (see week 11, Blogging from Burma, for more on this).

The sad thing is that Barger, who introduced a medium that has become immensely popular and well-used around the world, and is also a vital component for our assessment in this subject, is now homeless and penniless.

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