Blog Post No.4: Blogging, How Thoughts Are Shared In Today's Society

The history of blogging is intense and vast. The timeline starts in 1994 when Justin Hall created the first blog on links.net where he reviewed different examples of HTML. Hall called his website a personal homepage as the idea of a blog was not in circulation yet. That changed in 1997 when Jorn Barger defined the term “weblog”. Barger was the first person on record to create a specific term to define the idea of logging onto the web. The term went from “weblog” to the term we all use today “blog” in 1999. 

Blogging was revolutionized by the creation of the blogging platform Blogger in 1999 by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan. Blogger made it simple and easy for the average person to create a blog and post anything that they pleased. In the early 2000s “Blogads” we created. This again revolutionized the blogging world as “Blogads” was the first broker of blog advertising and people began to make money from their posts. As of 2016, Blogads is no longer in service. 

We begin to see what we know as modern-day blogging in the 2000s. In 2005 YouTube was launched which gave way to a new form of video blogging or more commonly known as vlogging. Vlogging transformed the way people communicate online. Vlogging has become so popular today that some individuals do it as a career. Roughly a YouTuber can make three to five dollars per one thousand views. This may not seem like a lot of money but some YouTuber videos have over a hundred thousand views per video which roughly equivocates to 300,000 to 500,000 per video. A YouTuber can produce several videos per week which means their total yearly income can be in the millions. 

Another important social media that influenced the history of blogging was the creation of Twitter in 2006. Twitter has a very small character limit of 280 words per tweet. The limitations proposed by Twitter gave way to the idea of microblogging. Microblogging is the sharing of information in the smallest forum possible. Twitter gives anyone the ability to share their thoughts at any time without any restrictions. 

In 2016 personal blogs got a new domain. WordPress created the domain .blog to help separate the blogs from other types of websites on the internet. This is where and how the majority of modern blogging is done. People can now create their own personal blog with the domain .blog. 

Blogs have a great positive and negative impact on and in society. People are able to connect from all parts of the world through shared interests because of blogging. Blogs give the voiceless a platform to express themselves. However, this can lead to the further radicalization of impressionable individuals. Some people become more alienated from society and extremists by looking at the blog post of those who also share their ideas. Ultimately, blogs are an important form of communication that has shaped modern day society for better and worst.