Saturday 23 April 2011

A Blogpost about Blogging and the History of Blogposts

Okay, thanks to my Easter break being sucked up having to Manufacture the machine for my final year project in uni, I've not been updating this nearly as much as I wanted. I'm going to aim for atleast 1 a week, on the weekend. There may well be an update mid-week, or even two interspersed, depends on how much work I have. This will give me more time to keep up with the people I follow, which is always nice. And so, this brings me nicely onto this weeks blog:

Blogging.

Blog noun, verb
~ noun
A website containing a collection of a writer's thoughts, experiences, observations, opinions, etc., often containing images and links from other wbesites.
~ verb
To maintain or add new entries to a blog
[source]

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999. This has also been applied to to classify certain types of blogs, video (b)log => vlog.
[source / source]

From this, many different terms have been coined. Two prominent ones:
- Blogosphere: The collective term for the whole movement that is blogging. The blogoshpere is growing at a remarkable rate, and becoming more versitile (the most recent of which that I can think of is Twitter, a form of micro-blogging).
- Blogroll: A column to the side of a blog containing a list of links to other recommended blogs (I really need to change the name of my blog).

According to Blogpulse, a blog indexing site, there are 160,415,796 identified blogs (surprisingly small number in my opinion) and 75,625 have been created in the last 24 hours. I'm not sure how accurate this site is, it gives no indication that I can find on how it indexes and finds new blogs other than people submitting them for indexing. Surely it would crawl popular blogging sites and just index them as they crop up?
[source]

The history of blogging is partiularly tricky to trace back. For one, blogs first evolved from online diaries, when people first started documenting things that went on in their day to day lives. Some many distinguish a difference here, and therefore make the officialy start of blogging very difficult to pinpoint. Even disregarding this it's difficult, the net back then was a small place, with no where near the audience it does in modern standards. Therefore, it's a bit harder to trace back: not everything was indexed or documented. However, the "founding father" or blogs seems to be Justin Hall. In 1994 he decided it'd be a great idea to share his thoughts with the internet.
[source]

A final warning: blogging can get you into a lot of trouble.:
- If you're a dictator, or any form of facsist/controlling government, beware of revolts and protests being organised via blogging sites. Microblogging in the form of twitter and Facebook (arguably a form of micro blogging) lead to the White Revolution in Egypt in the first months of 2011.
- Don't reveal your employers trade secrets on a blogging site. Mark Jen was fired from Google in 2005 after a whole 10 days of employment as Assistant Product Manager after blogging about products and services not yet released or announced. Especially stupid considering he used the Google-owned Blogger service.
- If you're in a controlling country, where death or life imprisonment is possible for drawing cartoons being critical of the Head of State, then don't blog about it. Nay Phone Latt of Burma leanred the hard way and was sentanced to 20 years imprisonment for just that.

That's all for this week, sorry it's a little longer than anticipated, I wanted to write more on the growing popularity, but I thought that'd be overkill. Hope you've learned something interesting. 'Till next time.

5 comments:

  1. Well you sure analyzed the hell out of that lol. I never thought about the history of it myself, just knew it was a fairly new concept in the grand scheme of things.

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  2. I just love blogging. Thanks for all this great information.

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  3. i love blogging i do it very frequently
    it's great!

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  4. I didn't know that facts. You know enough to keep us informed ? Let's go mate.

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