CREATE BLOG |
ANATOMY OF A TYPICAL BLOGGER |
The original bloggers were HTML-savvy people who probably worked days in some web-related capacity and would spend their evenings surfing the web and working on their sites. Their blogs were closer to the media-filter variety. That is, they were a combination of annotated links to news articles and interesting sites with the occasional personal thought or maybe an essay. This was to be a model for future bloggers, or at least a jumping off point.
The typical blogger at this point served as a guide to the Internet, bringing his or her readers to unexplored sites on the web or news articles on a subject of particular interest. The links would, of course, include commentary. Early bloggers often had an area of expertise and would follow a topic or several topics with their blog, making the blog a valuable resource to anyone else in that field. A blog became an easy way to make a name for yourself on the web, not just because you could build a web page, but because you tracked down information of particular interest to you and your audience.
These early bloggers were good at what they did, and this helped to promote the concept of blogs even more. Blogs were practically designed for short, pithy commentary and links, so it was important to be succinct when posting. This had two beneficial results: good, clean writing and great web reading. At this point, blogs were popular only with a certain crowd—they were not yet a phenomenon. But that was soon to change.
On August 23, 1999 a site called Pitas launched. It was a very easy-to-use online tool for building your own blog. Now it was much easier to create a blog, and hundreds of more sites appeared very quickly. In August of the same year, both Blogger and GrokSoup, two more build-your-own blog providers, launched and the popularity of the blog format soared. They started my blog with Blogger around this time. Soon after, software industry veteran Dave Winer and crew announced Edit This Page, yet another personal publishing system, and blogs starting popping up everywhere. They were growing off the charts.
The introduction of Blogger had a huge impact. Its simple interface and big empty box for entering a post made creating and posting to a blog so easy that the format of the blog began to take on a more free-form style. People began blogging random thoughts, musings, and things that happened on the subway several times a day. Bloggers took to linking to each other rather than remote corners of the web or news articles, and a strong community began to develop.
There were still a number of serious media-filter type of blogs, but now there was also a growing crowd of diarists filling up the web and strengthening the community. Around this time, Blogger and blogs in general started to get some press. This only made the format more popular. New Yorker Magazine, The New York Times, Wired Magazine, and other traditional print media covered the blog explosion.