Blogs have been around for over a decade, but they’ve come a long way since their inception. There was a time in the early days of the Internet when Web sites were fairly static destinations for information. As new ways evolved for people without extensive technical knowledge to develop their own Web presences, blogging was born.
The term blog is a fusion of the words Web and log and is sometimes still referred to as weblog. Originally, blogs were simple online diaries where people posted the daily events of their lives. Typically, people wrote blogs to keep friends and family connected. For example, a woman might update her online diary with information about her journey through pregnancy to share the events with her family and friends across long distances. Just as the telephone brought people closer than ever a century earlier, blogs brought people from around the world together at the end of the 20th century.
In the beginning: Blogs began as very rudimentary Web pages that looked like little more than a lengthy narrative of text (and possibly some pictures), sometimes with entry dates acting as content separators, just as the pages of a hard copy diary or journal might look. Early blogs didn’t include the social element that today’s blogs offer through the commenting feature, which allows two-way conversation to take place. In this sense, early blogs were still a one-sided conversation and evolved during the transitional period of the growth of the World Wide Web.
Not only was the layout of the content simple, but the overall design was as well. More technical knowledge was required to create a blog in 1994, such as HTML coding skills or access to expensive software that would allow people to create their own Web pages. Therefore, some folks might argue that blogging as we know it today didn’t actually begin until 1999, when hosted blogging applications — such as LiveJournal.com and Blogger.com — debuted and made blogging accessible, easy, and free to the masses.
It wasn’t until 2002–2003 that blogging became popular among broad audiences. According to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report, the number of blogs grew from under 200,000 in 2003 to over 184 million in 2008. Suddenly, what was originally viewed as a tool for personal communication turned into an alternative media channel: Journalists, politicians, businesses, and experts in a wide variety of industries and fields started their own blogs and gained notoriety and popularity because of them.
Blogs today: What was once considered an ancillary or fun way to get online has turned into an essential tool to many. Today, blogs are competing with mainstream media in delivering news and information faster and more accurately than ever before.
Blogs have come a long way in terms of design and use. No longer are they simple online diaries. Today, blogs are used for a myriad of reasons, from sharing information with friends and families, to spreading political news, to promoting a business, to making money, and everything in between. The opportunities are endless.
In fact, many business Web sites are built using a blogging application, such as WordPress.org, rather than more traditional Web design techniques. Why? Because blogs are very easy for business owners to update and modify without incurring huge investments in redesigns. Blogging applications are so easy to use and customize that users can create just about any kind of Web site they want with them — not just online diaries.
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