The "Mainstream" History of Blogging

Blogging could not exist anywhere but in cyberspace; the act is web-exclusive in form and function. In 1997, Jesse James Garrett, editor of Infosift (now defunct) compiled a list of “sites like his” that he found on the web. He sent the list to Cameron Barrett, editor of CamWorld < http://www.camworld.com/> and they began compiling lists of URLs of interest to them. In 1999, Peter Merholz pronounced the term “weblog” as “wee-blog” and the inevitable shortening to “blog” occurred shortly thereafter. Within a short time, the appeal of the new form of “personal journalism” had spread, and people around the world were publishing their own blogs. Brigitte Eaton created Eatonweb Portal to sift this flood of newly created blogs and in doing so defined the blog according to one criterion: a site that consists of dated entries. New software, such as Pyra’s Blogger (now owned by Google) or Moveable Type emerged to ensure that that the digital realm once reserved for HTML-savvy web designers would remain open to the public.


Blogs emerged as hubs where websurfers complied links accompanied by commentary for discerning/interested audiences. Bloggers who “linked” considered themselves journalists of sorts as they disseminated the information for their audiences, which are frequently referred to as “communities” of readers (Rosen 2005). Rebecca Blood, editor of the weblog What’s in Rebecca’s Pocket and author of the first definitive book on blogs, The Weblog Handbook, characterizes the original blogs as providing “pre-surfed” content, where weblog editors culled the “most mind-boggling, the most stupid, the most compelling” from the web. More significant, she notes, is the importance of these blogs in distinguishing the difference between public and audience, the participatory nature of the public versus the passivity of the audience. Blogging is a participatory act that questions the “vested interests of our sources of information and the expertise of individual reporters” while simultaneously questioning the validity of corporate control of the media (Blood, 2002, p.8).