History of Blogging

Blogging, one of the most important tools of Digital Marketing is now the thing
which everyone knows. Taking from the first ever blog written it has been the period of 28
years till now. Blogs were started as an online journal and were made up of plain text. Many
companies are claiming about world’s first blogger and it is still the matter of dispute. In
1993, just around the time, Bill Clinton was sworn in as US President, World’s first blog has
been written. Rob Palmer, the self-described world’s first blogger and digital nomad, started
writing which was essentially a blog for a communications company he’d been hired by in
London.
In 1994, Personal Blogging has been started by 19-year-old Justin Hall who started
sharing Dirty details of his personal life on his website. At that time, it wasn’t called a blog.
The term Weblog is coined in 1997. The widely used term Blog is the short for Weblog,
which means a log or written documentation that is published on the World Wide Web. Early
American Blogger Jorn Barger has coined this term, prior to that blogs are being called as
“Online Journals” or “Online Diaries.”
In 1998, the first blogging platform Open Diary was launched. It was designed to
allow everyday internet users the ability to broadcast their own weblogs. The platform also
provided space for readers to comment on posts. Around this time only, the Weblog was
shortened to Blog.
In 1999, LiveJournal and Blogger both scrambled in the scene followed by Xanga in
2000 which gave birth to the competition between the blogging platforms. In 2003,
WordPress, the current largest blogging platform entered the blogging sector when College
students Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little had an idea of WordPress which blossomed into
what would eventually become the most popular content management system (CMS) in the
world. Over one third of websites are currently managed on WordPress. In the same year
another less-technical platform TypePad was introduced. This was the time when a lot of
today’s top hosting companies started jumping onto the scene.
The year 2003 was a busy one in the history of blogging. During that same year,
Google purchased one of the largest blogging platforms, Blogger. At that point in time,
Google was still fighting hard to climb the ladder of becoming the most popular search
engine in the world. And buying up all of those blogs allowed the company to glean more
data than ever before—which drastically improved the quality of their growing search engine.
At the same time as they were buying up popular blogging platforms, Google was
also working on and launching two of their flagship products, AdSense and AdWords. These
are the products that, among other things, allow people to monetize their blogs through
advertisements from relevant products and services, which is a big step in altering the course
of the history of blogging.
In 2004, Blog becomes the word of the year. This was significant, because it showed
how much blogging was impacting the mainstream world. Rather than automatically tuning
in to news stations or opening a newspaper, Americans were beginning to turn to their
favourite blogs for the content (and even news updates) they were craving.

In 2005, You Tube launched and the platform set the stage for what would become
the modern Vlog. Vlog is the video-based Blog. While some had been looking at blogs and
taking them as seriously as they the largest news outlets for years by this point, 2006 brought
a new age with the launches of Huffington Post and BuzzFeed.
These platforms had the look and feel of a mainstream news site, but glancing through
some of the “articles,” many were written as editorial content, fun listicles and explorations
into other creative blog post ideas writers wanted to try out with their growing blog
audiences. These sites also mastered the art of teaching their journalists how to write a
headline that’s designed to capture reader attention. The side effect is that the distinction
between fact and opinion became more blurred after this point, which is a trend that’s
continued today in some corners of the Internet.
In late 2006, ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse suggested to his readers that they keep their
blog post length short enough to allow the average reader to get through it in about a minute
and a half. It was also around this time that a little-known blogger, Tim Ferriss started his
blog to drum up press for his upcoming book, The 4-Hour Workweek.
If the average person reads 200 or 250 words per minute, this would mean that the
ideal blog post during this period of time may have been somewhere between 300 and 400
words. That’s pretty short by today’s standards. But, if short was good, then ultra-short must
have been better, right? A new era in the history of blogging, called microblogging, had
begun.
At this point, Twitter had been humming along for about a year, but it finally took off
and became explosively popular in 2007. How much could you really say in 140 characters,
(which was the limit at the time)? Enough, apparently, because the site is still wildly
successful over a decade later.
The “Medium” is founded in 2012. This online publishing platform (that now has
some paywalled content), was wide open to all for the first few years of its life. There are
both professional and amateur writers publishing their blog posts on Medium, and similar to
BuzzFeed and HuffPo, it tends to blur the line between news and opinion. Medium gave yet
another outlet to social journalists who wanted to make their mark, find a target audience
online and grow their communities.
Blogging had become so popular by 2016, that WordPress decided to add the domain
extension .blog to its list of possible blog URLs. This meant that in addition to the original
six (at the time) domain extensions in popular use, which included .com, .net, and .org,
people and organizations could now choose a domain name with the .blog extension. This
move opened up many new domain options and highlighted the popularity of blogging.
The history of blogging will never be over. We can still become the part of it. There
are 31.7 million other loggers in the US alone. This rapid growth of blogging shows how
demanded it is and assures the continued growth of blogging in the future as well.