Happy 10th Birthday to blogs

Blogging is 10 years old today according to The Guardian.
Blogs mark the first 10 years


After a quiet start they revolutionised the web; now one is born every second

Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent
Saturday April 7, 2007
The Guardian

"Check this out. Amazing!" It took just a brief sentence, and after those four words a revolution followed.

The first entry on Scripting News effectively ushered in the first blog 10 years ago. In the intervening years these online diaries have been touted as the future of media, labelled "pathetic drivel", and caused court cases, prison sentences and international incidents. But love them or loathe them, bloggers around the world have ensured incredible growth for the medium. Latest figures indicate an estimated 70m blogs in existence, with around 1.5m posts being written every day.

Scripting News, written by the prickly New Yorker Dave Winer, began with a whimper rather than a bang: his first entries were little more than a list of websites he had visited that day. But despite its lacklustre launch, the site became one of a small coterie of online destinations that began the revolution.

The word blog was not officially coined until two years later, but over the past week bloggers have gathered around the web to celebrate this ad-hoc anniversary.

"Try to imagine the breadth of changes they brought to the web," said Anil Dash, an early blogger who now works for the software company Six Apart.

"Blogging has gone from an unnamed or even nebulous concept to helping form a nascent community, and then to the fundamental evolution of the social web."

The hobby started to become increasingly popular thanks to the Blogger.com website, founded in 1999, gaining further momentum after the September 11 attacks. "We're seeing about 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day," said Dave Sifry, the chief executive of the blog monitoring site Technorati. "That's about 1.4 blogs created every second."

Technorati's figures suggest that the medium is dominated by Japanese and English-speaking people, who contribute around two-thirds of all posts on the web. Most sites are read by a tiny group of friends and family, acting like public noticeboards, but some have grabbed headlines and helped build careers for their authors.

Many writers - some of them anonymous - have signed lucrative book deals on the back of their blog's success, and others have become minor celebrities.

Every subject from farming to finance has bloggers writing about it in their spare time. Businesses are using the medium to reach out to customers, while news organisations, including the Guardian, now run stables of blogs to try to bring readers into closer contact with their journalists. There are also significant minorities blogging in politically repressive countries such as Iran and China, which has led many to hail blogs as a powerful force for challenging the establishment.

"Blogging and other kinds of conversational media are the early tools of a truly read-write web," said Dan Gillmor, author of citizen journalism bible We The Media. "They've helped turn media consumers into creators, and creators into collaborators - a shift whose impact we're just beginning to feel, much less understand."

In China, 50 bloggers and "cyber-dissidents" have been imprisoned in the past eight years, and most recently a man known as Kareem Amer was imprisoned for three years in Egypt for insulting Islam and the country's president, Hosni Mubarak, on his blog.

Not everyone believes the influence of blogging will be long lasting. Andrew Keen, a former dotcom entrepreneur and the author of the forthcoming book Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture, says that though it is enticing to believe that online diaries are empowering, the hype is dangerous.

"It's seductive in the sense that it convinces people to think they have more to say and are more interesting than they really are," he said. "The real issue is whether it adds any more to our culture. Most of it is just so transient and ephemeral."

The rise of the blog also triggered the explosion of other sites on which ordinary people share their experiences, from social networks such as MySpace and Facebook to the video-sharing website YouTube. Mr Keen says this "digital narcissism" is spurred on in large part by the internet's overemphasis of a libertarian political outlook, and a tendency to make individuals talk to themselves about themselves.

But he admits that there have also been some important contributions.

"Not every blogger is a narcissist who has nothing to say. In particular there are people in China and Iraq who are blogging - and that is very brave," he said.

"But generally I don't see a social benefit. It's just a great vehicle for next-generation media personalities. Why do I want to know what some guy sitting on the west coast of America thinks about Iraq? Would you pay to listen to this person?"

A decade on: media milestones

April 1997
Dave Winer helps kick off new kind of website, and the name weblog is coined in December to describe the phenomenon

August 1999
Blogger.com, a website which helps popularise the form, is launched

September 2001
Big growth in American blogs after the terrorist attacks

December 2002
Pressure from bloggers helps force out the Republican majority leader in the US Senate, Trent Lott, after he appears to praise racial segregation

February 2003
Blogger.com bought by Google

March 2003
Iraqi architect known as Salam Pax becomes one of the most important voices to come to prominence since the invasion. Pax remains influential, with a book and work for the Guardian and Newsnight, among others

October 2003
Belle de Jour, the anonymous writer of a blog chronicling the life of a high-class London escort, gets a publishing deal, setting a precedent for so-called "blooks"

May 2004
Jessica Cutler, a congressional assistant, details her sex life on her blog, Washingtonienne, sparking a scandal

July 2005
Blogosphere now doubling in size every five months

April 2007
Around 70m blogs in existence, according to Technorati.com

UPDATE: 15.33: from the Guardian News Blog:

By Bobbie Johnson / Blogs 08:33am

Some of your friends may still be hardpressed to describe what one is, and you may well be feeling guilty about not updating your own often enough - but hang out the bunting because blogging is now 10 years old, write Bobbie Johnson and Mark Oliver.

Blogs might still feel rather novel, but there are now something like 70m of them around the globe. To mark the 10th birthday of the form we have come up with a list of noteworthy modern blogs and crucial moments from the first decade of blogging.

Our notable blogs aren't in any particular order, but please post any alternative lists or glaring omissions in the comments.

Dave Winer begins blogging

Created by the US web guru Dave Winer, Scripting News is sometimes described as the first modern blog, though the term "weblog" was not used in the early days. Flickering into life on April 1 1997, Scripting News is still going strong and is credited with helping popularise RSS and podcasting, too. Winer himself actually calls info.cern.ch, built by Tim Berners-Lee, the first weblog because it "pointed to all the new sites as they came online".

Blogger.com brings blogging to the masses

Blogging was still a tiny niche activity in 1999, when a little site called Blogger launched. By making it simple for anybody to create their own site - particularly through its Blogspot hosting service - the company behind Blogger changed the face of the medium. And then it got bought by Google.

Salam Pax

His blog, Where is Raed?, came to prominence during the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, as big media scrambled for eloquent Iraqi voices who were trying to make sense of the chaos. The Guardian tracked him down and, through his blog, his work for Guardian Film and his appearances on BBC Newsnight, he remains a key Iraqi commentator. Pax also created another blog called, rather divertingly, Shut up, you fat whiner!

Rathergate rakes up anti-media hatred

Pressure from bloggers led to the resignation of the US TV news anchor Dan Rather, after a rightwing site, Little Green Footballs, discovered holes in an exposé of President Bush's military record.

China's anti-blogging purge

Internet censorship mean blogging is tough in authoritarian countries such as China. Political agitation has led to a number of people being incarcerated for their online comments - low points for blogging, which nonetheless mark out the way blogs can challenge freedom of speech. Among the victims were the blogger and filmmaker Hao Wu, but Reporters Sans Frontières has a full list .

Trent gets the Lott

The former Republican Senate majority leader Trent Lott was hounded out of office in 2002 after appearing to praise racial segregation. Though the story was dropped by the mainstream news, the continuing controversy among bloggers eventually led to his resignation.

Washingtonienne

Jessica Cutler was a congressional staff assistant for a senator and her blog, Washingtonienne, about her sex life, sparked a Capitol Hill scandal. She now blogs at Jessicacutleronline.

Dooce

The practice of being sacked for writing a blog is sometimes called "being dooced" after the US designer and blogger Heather
Armstrong, who, writing under the pseudonym, was fired in 2002.

Egypt goes nuclear on blogger

Abdel Kareem Soliman, a 22-year-old student, was the first blogger to be prosecuted in Egypt and was sentenced to four years in jail in February this year. He had used his blog to criticise President Hosni Mubarak, describing him as a dictator and criticising the country's top Islamic university. There is an online campaign to Free Kareem. Amnesty International condemned his prosecution and has been campaigning against the jailing of bloggers in other countries, such as China, and against attacks on freedom of expression online by various regimes.

Belle du Jour

The anonymous writer of this blog chronicling the life of a high-class London escort became something of a literary sensation in 2005; the site has in the past attracted 15,000 hits a day. Last year she missed out on winning the first blooker prize - for books made into blogs - to Julie Powell, who turned her blog into 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. Another contender was Eggs, Bacon, Chips and Beans: 50 Great Cafes and the Stuff that Makes Them Great.

Jorn Barger coins "weblog"

He's beardy and a little bit weirdy, but Barger, an early blogger on his Robot Wisdom site, first came up with the term "web log" (log of the web, obviously).

"Blog" becomes a word

The contraction was first used in 1999, but it wasn't until 2004 that it got wholesale recognition - with the Merriam Webster dictionary making it its word of the year.

Clooney spooked by stalkers

Gawker, a New York gossip site, came up with a way for readers to track celebs they had spotted. George Clooney disapproved - and asked his fans to post fake sightings in order to protect his privacy.

Rachel North was a survivor of the July 7 2005 bomb attacks in London. She was on the Piccadilly line train on which 26 people died. In the days afterwards she wrote about her experiences on the BBC website and later started a blog, which she updates regularly and on which writes passionately about the "war on terror" and its associated politics, as well as other subjects. Since starting the blog she has written for national newspapers, including the Sunday Times, and, while insisting she does not speak "for all the victims of 7/7", has been a prominent voice among them.

Eason Jordan resigns

The CNN boss, Eason Jordan, made some remarks about American soldiers targeting journalists in Iraq during a session at Davos under the Chatham House rule. Bloggers broke the rule, broke the story and Jordan resigned his post.

Josh Wolf imprisoned

When the journalist Josh Wolf was asked to hand over more details about the people in his films, he refused, saying it was his right to protect his sources. He was sent to jail for 226 days, one of the longest sentences for any journalist found in contempt of court.

Woolamaloo Gazette

In 2005, the Edinburgh bookseller Joe Gordon became the first blogger in the UK to be sacked for his writing. He had worked at a Waterstones in the city for 11 years but his employers were not keen about the posts on his blog Woolamaloo, in which he sometimes satirised his "sandal-wearing boss".

Petite Anglaise

Last summer, Catherine Sanderson, a Briton working in Paris, was sacked from her job at the British accountants Dixon Wilson over her blog petiteanglaise. She was awarded a year's salary from an employment tribunal last month.

Guido sparks a revolution

Paul Staines, a right-leaning libertarian, has made Guido Fawkes a hive of political gossip and rumour, which attracts almost 300,000 visitors a month.

Ze Frank goes video

Ze Frank was initially best known for a viral clip of stupid dancing that went around the internet like wildfire. Then he decided to spend a year producing a daily video show, which turned out to be funny, inspiring and sometimes a little bit sad.

MPs get connected

Quite a few MPs now have a blog. We are scratching our heads here but think the Labour MP Tom Watson may have been the first one to start blogging (his site has a good list of fellow Labour bloggers). David Miliband, the secretary of state for environment - and man who is not going to run against Gordon Brown, honest - also blogs on his department's website. Politicians such as Nick Clegg write "diaries" on their sites, and in his pre-Tory leader days David Cameron wrote a diary for Guardian Unlimited Politics. The Tory blonde Boris Johnson also has a blog.

Blogs open up Iran

Hossein Derakhshan was born in Tehran and is now based in Toronto. He has been blogging about Iran since 2002 and retains contacts there, has written about trips back and promotes the Iran blogosphere, which has become an important space for freedom of expression, despite the ruling theocracy's attempts to curb it.
Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also, of course, has a blog, which he rarely updates, though there is now an entry from this year, in which he cites his "heavy schedules" for the lack of blog action.

Kos comes from left field

The left-leaning Daily Kos was set up by a Chicago-born former US soldier, Markos Moultsas Zuniga, in 2002 and in recent years has become a hub for debate over the future of progressive Democratic politics. As Wikipedia puts it, Daily Kos is a great example of a "collaborative blog" which offers users limitless posting privileges.

Wil Wheaton gets geek love

In an attempt to destroy the stereotype of geeky, science fiction obsessed nerds, bloggers in 2002 decided that Wil Wheaton - who played Wes Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation - was their favourite blogger. It must have felt good for Wheaton, who had years of abuse from Trek fans who had hated the character he played in the series.

Boing Boing bounces to the fore

Formed from the dregs of a defunct fanzine, Boing Boing came from nowhere to become the world's most famous blog. It is now a useful resource for geek hipsters, anyone interested in unicorn chasers and general web weirdness.

Howard Dean blogs for the White House

He of the infamous scream notably had a blog when he was running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, and it still exists as a "grassroots" community site for Democrats.

Kottke passes round the begging bowl

Jason Kottke, one of the earliest hardcore bloggers, decided to open up his future to the readers of his site. He asked for their donations to help him live for a year - and they duly obliged.

Scoble dumps softies

Robert Scoble has become one of the world's biggest bloggers, talking to techie audiences about, erm, things technological. He rose to prominence as a paid evangelist for Microsoft - but decided he'd had enough last year and quit for a dotcom startup.

Rocketboom blows up

As one of the earliest pioneers of videoblogging, Rocketboom was making a name for itself - and then its host, Amanda Congdon, quit after an argument with its creator, Andrew Baron; cue an ugly bout of mudslinging that did nobody any favours.

Kaycee Nicole

The tragic story of a teenager dying from cancer went from the horrible to the ridiculous when it turned out to have been a hoax.

Techcrunch gets crunchier

A Silicon Valley lawyer turned pundit, Mike Arrington, formed Techcrunch to talk about startup companies. Pretty soon it was very high profile, he was getting himself into all sorts of scrapes and ended up being blamed for everything bubblicious about the web industry.

Dirty laundry washed in public

More an art project than a blog, Postsecret decided to use old media - postcards - in the new media, and reveal people's hidden foibles. Awards ensued.

Bloggies get bigger

Every self-aggrandising industry needs its own awards ceremony, and it was clear that blogging had made it when an obscure kid from Michigan decided to set up The Bloggies. They are now an institution, rewarding people everybody has heard of for writing nobody remembers.

Instapundit helps change political blogging

After September 11, there were thousands of angst-ridden Americans. Among the most prominent of them was Instapundit, a keyboard-addicted lawyer who emitted a rapid-fire sequence of snarks and libertarian quips.

The rise of the open blog

Plenty of sites decided to let anybody blog on their pages about interesting things online, but the weapon of choice for many is Metafilter, still going strong after eight years and founded by a former Blogger.com worker.

Gillmor stokes the revolution

We the Media, a book by the former Silicon Valley journalist Dan Gillmor, became the bible for bloggers angry at the mainstream media. His premise - that the internet empowered "citizen journalists" - was taken up by enthusiasts and turned into a credo.

Anderson wires up

The next book to cast a shadow over blogging was The Long Tail, a treatise on why the grassroots revolution epitomised by blogging was great news for free market capitalists and businesses everywhere. Tiny online stores rejoiced; Amazon cashed in.

Wal-Mart across America

It did not take long for businesses to cotton on to the possibilities of blogging. They tried paying bloggers to say nice things about them. But things got juicy when it turned out that a folksy blog about a couple crossing America was just a PR stunt for Wal-Mart. Whoops.

Calacanis sells Weblogs Inc

If ever there were a good sign of a bubble, it is when a slightly strange company pays huge amounts of money for something. So hello AOL, who spent around $30m on the network of niche blogs run by the serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis.

Kathy Sierra's death threats

The Prominent blogger Kathy Sierra said she was no longer going out in public because people had written such threatening things about her. The blogosphere erupted in outcry over the haters. A week later, all was forgotten and the slanging matches resumed.
Contemporaria
This post was last changed at 02:33 PM, April 6 2007, at a time when the top headline on Guardian Unlimited was Captured crew tell of ordeal, and the top headline from the BBC was UK captives tell of ill treatment, and there were posts elsewhere tagged with these same keywords: blogs

The post was written by Bobbie Johnson. You can email the author at bobbie.johnson@guardian.co.uk