The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20080411075325/http://cjrarchives.org:80/issues/2003/5/blog-jensen.asp?printerfriendly=yes
Issue 5: September/October

EMERGING ALTERNATIVES
A Brief History of Weblogs

The growing power of Weblogs, or "blogs," has hardly gone unnoticed. Bloggers have been credited with helping to topple Trent Lott and Howell Raines, with inflaming debate over the Iraq war, and with boosting presidential hopeful Howard Dean. Suddenly, it seems, everyone from Barbra Streisand (whose site is a lefty clearinghouse) to guy-next-door Bruce Cole (a San Francisco foodie whose blog is called Sauté Wednesday), has been swept into the blogosphere. But blogs aren't as new as you may think. They have actually been around since the early days of the Internet. In the strictest sense, a blog is someone's online record of the Web sites he or she visits.

Today's blogs, of course, are much more than that. In 1999 there were dozens of blogs. Now there are millions. What happened?

Simply put, some of the blogging pioneers — in aneffort to make their own work easier — built tools that allow anyone, no matter how little Internet savvy he or she possesses, to create and maintain a blog. All you need to get started is a name, a password, and an e-mail address. The most popular of these tools is the aptly named Blogger.com, which was launched in August 1999 by Evan Williams, Paul Bausch, and Meg Hourihan and quickly became the largest and best-known of its kind. Part of Blogger.com's appeal is that it lets people store blogs on their own servers, rather than on a remote base. This allows them to have a personalized address (like www.yourname.com), whereas with other blogging tools your address starts at the remote server.

Blogger.com — which was recently snatched up by Google from the owner, Pyra Labs, for an undisclosed sum — may be the biggest, but it wasn't the first. That honor goes to Andrew Smales, a programmer in Toronto who launched the first do-it-yourself blog tool — Pitas.com — in July 1999. Smales, twenty-nine, sort of blundered into blogging as he was developing software that would allow him to more easily update his personal Web site and also facilitate the "online diary community" he envisioned. Personal sites such as his aren't listed prominently on Internet search engines, and Smales thought it would be "cool if I could just click around to read what other people were saying," rather than surf blindly for their sites. As Smales worked on the software, he posted updates on his site, prompting visitors to offer suggestions. It was a comment from a visitor that clued Smales into the nascent blogging community, and he set to work on a sister project to the diary software — a blogging tool that would become Pitas. Diaryland, Smales's diary site, followed soon thereafter, and both have grown steadily since.

Smales says the explosion of blog tools was simply a matter of critical mass. "There were finally enough people online writing blogs and wanting to read them" that someone was bound to find a way to ease the process. In fact, he notes, the technology behind these tools was neither new nor terribly sophisticated. His own reason for starting the project offers another explanation: people like to peek into others' lives. Reading a blog has a bit of the voyeuristic thrill of flipping through someone's journal, no matter how mundane the content. Today's blogs have evolved well beyond the lists of links that characterized early efforts. They are diaries and soapboxes, where people can post everything from daily minutiae to manifestoes to sophisticated political and cultural commentary and reporting. The evolution of Diaryland and Pitas exemplifies this, because while Smales originally had different aims for each, their content is now indistinguishable. So if his dream for an online diary community has not been fully realized, it certainly has been adopted in spirit.

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