What Is This Blog Thing And Where Did It Come From?
It is increasingly hard to find a person who has never seen a blog or doesn’t know what it is. But in order to understand why blogs are as they are, you need to know how they started and how they evolved.
A long time ago – when AltaVista was the best search engine around, Yahoo was just a collection of links, and GeoCities were all the rage – people didn’t have blogs, they had home pages. Most of these were static – I wouldn’t say stale, because they weren’t meant to be constantly updated back then.
At that time there were web pages on many topics built by enthusiasts and without any wish for monetization. Over time people started making pages more personal, more detailed, and more often updated. That was the birth of what was known as a web-log – a log of news, events, and opinions put on the web – which is where the name blog was derived from.
Blogs at that time were much unlike what you see today. Comments, for example – something that you expect by default – were non-existent. But people wanted to comment on each other’s posts – here’s what they did:
- John writes an opinion about the newest widget on his blog
- Mary wants to comment on John’s post, so she posts the comment on her blog and links to John
- Jane wants to add to the discussion so she writes her own post and links to both John and Mary
What happened was that different posts by different people on different posts were all part of one big discussion. All you needed to do to join in was to write about it on your own blog and link to the others.
Blog posts at that time contained tons of links to other resources – mostly other posts in the discussion. This is where the reciprocal linking culture came from.
Later on people started adding collections of favorite links – the birth of the modern blog sidebar and widgets. The ability to write comments on the same blog appeared later – it became so universal that you expect to see it everywhere.
What we’re seeing now, by the way, is more people leaving comments on blogs, and less people linking to other blogs and posts – the fading of the linking culture.
Next time we’ll see how that relates to what is happening in the blogging world today; why blogs are so popular among all actors on today’s web – publishers, readers, and search engines alike; and how blogs are being used as tools by internet marketers .
I really appreciate that you keep coming back to my site, it's loyal people like you that make what I do worth it. If you have any questions feel free to email me at Tony [at] BeginWorkingOnline [dot] com. If you like what you read, and find it helpful, make sure to share it with a friend - they'll love you for it! Remember, this blog is not about me, it's about you - so participate in the discussion, let me and the other readers know what you think and how you're doing.
