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December 11, 2007

What Milestones Would You Include in a Timeline History of Blogging?

I'm working with the folks at NPR's Morning Edition on a series they're planning to do about the history of blogging and its impact on society, and one of the things I'm trying to write is a timeline identifying some of the major milestones. My goal is two-fold. First, I want to show that blogging's origins on the Internet pre-date the invention of the term "Web log" by many years, not to mention its historic relation to journal-writing more broadly. Second, I want to emphasize interesting milestones that would be of interest to a mainstream, non-technical audience, rather than create a comprehensive timeline with every minor technical, business, political and social milestone. I'm not sure what the overall word length will be, but it won't be huge, so I need to pick my milestones carefully.

Here are some of the milestones I've come up with so far:

Unknown: Mariners begin keeping a "log book" to record the speed of their ships, measured by "heaving the log," throwing overboard a piece of wood or lead attached to a long rope with knots in it.

Early 9th Century: Chinese philosopher Li Ao publishes one of the first known diaries, a travel journal entitled Lainan Lu ("Record of Coming to the South").

17th Century: Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn publish journals that are among the earliest diary best-sellers in the English language

1812: London publisher John Letts begins selling blank "page-a-day" books intended to be used as personal journals and business ledgers.

1966: James T. Kirk (William Shatner) begins an episode of Star Trek with the words "Captain's Log: Stardate," inspiring a generation of young diarists eager to document their own life events by any means necessary.

1967: The Internet is invented.

1979: The birth of USENET, a decentralized system of discussion boards, forming the basis of some of the Internet's oldest online communities.

1983: Brian Redman creates mod.ber, a USENET discussion through which he and his friends post summaries of interesting things they find online and offline.

1989: British researcher Tim Berners-Lee proposes the development of the World Wide Web.

1990: Margaret Lanterman, aka The Log Lady, begins dispensing advice and prophesies that supposedly emanate from the wooden log she carries on the TV series Twin Peaks. (It remains to be seen how much of an influence Lanterman is in blogging history, but I thought I'd err on the safe side and include her just in case.) Hat tip: Jim Long

1992: Berners-Lee launches the first website. Among his publishing innovations that year is the first "What's New" page, a Web page that places new updates at the top of each page, pushing older items down to the bottom.

1994: Claudio Pinhanez of MIT publishes his "Open Diary," a Web page documenting goings-on in his life. At the same time, online diarist Justin Hall would gain notoriety for creating a "personal homepage" on the Web covering his day-to-day activities in very revealing – and occasionally embarrassing - detail.

1994: Brian Lucas launches travel-library.com, a collection of online travel journals submitted by the public to the rec.travel USENET group.

1995: Vermeer Technologies releases FrontPage, one of the first Web publishing tools. Introduced the idea of allowing people without coding skills to publish websites.

1996: The 24 Hours in Cyberspace. Thousands of people use the Internet to collect photographs of people whose lives were affected by the Internet. An early experiment in collaborative photo blogging.

Feb 1997: Steve Gibson hired by Ritual Entertainment to journal on a full-time basis, making him one of the first professional bloggers.

Dec 1997: Jorn Barger uses the term "Weblog" for the first time to describe his online journal, Robot Wisdom.

1998: Open Diary becomes one of the first online tools to assist users in the publishing of online journals. Would later be followed by other journaling tools including LiveJournal (1999), DiaryLand (1999), Pitas (1999) Blogger (1999), Xanga (2000), Movable Type (2001) and Wordpress (2003).

Spring 1999: Online journal writer Peter Merholz jokingly takes the word "Weblog" and splits it into the phrase "We blog." Over time, "blog" would supercede "Weblog" as the term of art for describing online journals.

1999: Development of RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. Made it easier for people to subscribe to blog posts, as well as distribute them across the Internet, such as the early news aggregator Radio UserLand. (Hat tip: Joe Germuska)

2001: Big-name bloggers begin to emerge, including Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit)

2002: Bloggers focus their attention on comments made by Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) at a birthday party for Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-SC) that appear to endorse segregation. After intense coverage in the blogosphere, the story spreads throughout the media, forcing Lott to resign his leadership position in the senate.

2004: Bloggers play a major role in covering the presidential campaign; a number of them are credentialed to participate in the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Dan Rather resigns following pressure from bloggers who documented errors in a story about President George W. Bush's military service record.

2005 (?): The launch of some of the first blog search engines, including Feedster and Technorati, making it possible for people to track blog conversations on a continuous basis.

2005: Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard's Berkman Center launch GlobalVoicesOnline.org, an international network of bloggers emphasizing local and regional stories around the world that aren't being covered by mainstream media.

March 2005: Garrett M. Graff becomes the first blogger to receive credentials for the daily White House briefing.

2006: The launch of Twitter, one of the first "micro-blogging" communities that allows user to publish and receive short posts via the Web, text messaging and instant messaging.

2006: Research report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project estimates that 12 million U.S. adults publish their own blogs.

2007: Technorati is tracking more than 112 million blogs worldwide.


If you have any suggestions of ones you think I should edit, add or drop altogether, please feel free to post them as a comment. I need to put this to bed in the next couple of days, so if you can get me your suggestions no later than December 13, I'd really appreciate it.

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Posted by acarvin at December 11, 2007 11:27 AM

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