What is Blogging?

Happy Birthday Blogging

By Joshua S. Hill

Monday, July 16, 2007

While many will not be aware of the underlying currents of anger and unresolved answers filtering through the Internet, they are definitely there. Wikipedia has them in spades, and there are often very lively debates over which site is the better of its kind; Flickr of Picassa, Digg or… you get the picture. So with the year 2007 hurrying towards a close (I still can't believe it's July) it is time to, maybe, say happy birthday to Blogging.

However this is going to be one of those topics where I could either be applauded for my writing, or burned at the stake for giving credence to a publicly contrived misconception. For you see, the question at the root of this problem is what is blogging?

In an article for the Wall Street Journal, Tunku Varadarajan celebrates the birth of blogging's 10 years of age. He pins the date on what is believed to be the root of the term 'blogging'. On December the 23rd, 1997, Jorn Barger wrote on his website at the time: "I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis." The Oxford English Dictionary believes this to be the origin of the word.

However one look at Wikipedia will show you that to place the birth date of blogging with Mr. Barger's post would be folly; of sorts. Prior to the standard 'website' layout of the internet we all know and love today, there were newsgroups. Basically giant forum boards where people could post, well, anything they liked. Over a period of 8 months between 1983 and 84, a user named mod.ber began to post summaries of posts and interesting threads that they thought to be interesting. The user was Brian E. Redman, and along with a few associates, they were the first to use the serial posting type method to spread news.

However, still we can't rely on the 1997 date to be the beginning of what is now considered to be either an evil presence of slack-witted high school dropouts posting about their meager lives, or the new form of news distribution. If you're wondering, I'm with the last, but place anyone who uses MySpace in the first category.

1994 saw Justin Hall begin blogging 11 years while he was a student at Swarthmore College. Hall is generally considered to be one of the fathers of the modern day blogging.

We now arrive at Jorn, and we find that his only claim to fame is the possible belief that he accidentally provided those lazy enough to not want to say "website log" with the rights to squish it down to blog. The father of the term is believed to be Peter Merholz, who in the sidebar of his own website, broke the term weblog in to we blog; the year was 1999.

Without a doubt, since then, Blogging has taken on a somewhat pervasive attitude, and has grown inextricably across the internet like a plague of locusts. And, as with a plague of locusts, not everything it does is a bad thing; just most. The personal web log has spawned news sites such as our own Daily Galaxy, providing us with a new medium in which to provide you all with the interestingness of the internet. So, while I won't say Happy Birthday to the blog this year, I'll at least be thankful that someone saved me from saying website log, or weblog, or…