Continuing my preparation for a one-day seminar on how-to-blog, I’d like to pull together some milestone dates in the progress of blogging.

A blog hosting company called Blockstar has created a lovely timeline that goes back to 1992 when Tim Berners-Lee was collecting the bits and pieces that would become the web. The timeline acknowledges that “weblog” was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger. It also notes that the Blogger software was launched in 1999 by a company then called Pyra Labs. (Google acquired Pyra in 2003 and now runs Blogger).

An otherwise forgettable Forbes Magazine article entitled “Attack of the Blogs” contained some interesting dates in a graphic subtitled: A Brief History of Blogs. The graphic notes that in December 2002 “political bloggers drive Trent Lott from Senate Majority leader post over allegedly racist comments,” and that in August 2004, bloggers were first credentialed to cover U.S. political questions.

Political blogging won huge amounts of public attention and gave blogging, at least temporarily, rock star status. In January, a research report from the Pew Internet & American Life project said “8 million American adults say they have created blogs … still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.”

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media