A History of Blogging

Who’s Your Daddy? Your Blog Daddy That Is

CNET has an interesting article on who is the real BlogFather of all.

So is it the irascible Dave Winer? The iconoclastic Jorn Barger? Or was the first blogger really Justin Hall, a Web diarist and online gaming expert whom The New York Times Magazine once called the “founding father of personal blogging”?

Hint: It isn’t BLOGBloke either… in my own small way I may have contributed a little by showing bloggers how to create RSS newsfeeds from scratch when blogs didn’t offer feeds. Admittedly it was a small contribution but what we can learn from this is no one person can really lay claim to being the founder of blogs.

Many have participated in the evolution of the medium and that includes you and me. What’s more important than who did what is blogging is so much more than any of it’s parts, and that the idea of blogging remains pure – an empowering technology that ALL of us can benefit from.

As the blogosphere continues to evolve who knows where we will take it from here? But as we take this medium to the next level let’s be forever vigilant to ensure that blogging remains open and free from those who would exploit it as their own private blogarchy or ABM bank machine.

Now onward to the Evolution of Blogs:

Sometime in 1971
Stanford’s Les Earnest creates the “finger” protocol.

December 1977
The finger protocol becomes an official standard.

January 1994
Swarthmore student Justin Hall begins compiling lists of links at his site, links.net, and continues adding to the site for 11 years.

January 1995
Early online diarist Carolyn Burke publishes her first entry for Carolyn’s Diary.

April 1997
Dave Winer launches Scripting News, which he calls the longest-running Web log currently on the Internet.

September 1997
Slashdot begins publishing “News for Nerds.”

December 1997
Jorn Barger’s RobotWisdom.com site apparently becomes the first to call itself a Web log.

Sometime in 1999
• Brad Fitzpatrick launches Livejournal, which he calls his “accidental success.”
• Peter Merholz of Peterme.com declares he has decided “to pronounce the word ‘weblog’ as ‘wee-blog.’ Or ‘blog’ for short.”
• The word “blog” first appears in print, according to dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster.

August 1999
Three friends who founded a San Francisco start-up called Pyra Labs create a tool called Blogger “more or less on a whim.”

January 2001
First crop of blogs nominated for the “Bloggies” award.

October 2001
First version of Movable Type content management software becomes available.

February 2003
Google acquires Pyra and its Blogger software.

May 2003
First official version of WordPress open-source blogging software released for download.

October 2003
Six Apart releases first version of its Typepad blogging service.

January 2004
Boston-based Steve Garfield launches his video blog, considered one of the first such “vlogs.”

October 2005
VeriSign buys Dave Winer’s Weblogs.com. Around the same time, AOL snaps up blog publisher Weblogs Inc.

February 2006
Veteran blogger Jason Kottke abandons his yearlong attempt to live off of micropayments through his blog.

January 2007
Members of the Media Bloggers Association are among the first bloggers to receive press credentials from a federal court.

February 2007
Freelance video blogger Josh Wolf becomes the longest-serving journalist behind bars in U.S. history, on contempt charges.

You can read more of the evolution of blogs at CNET…

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