Internet blogging grows in popularity
Samantha Webster
UT Staff Writer
9/22/04
Diaries have come a long way.
This age-old, adolescent staple is no longer just for the girls. But don’t expect to see men toting a tiny, flower-covered book, pages kept safe from prying eyes by its little golden lock and key (ah, the instant nostalgia). With the growth of technology, we’ve stepped up a few notches in our journaling, and we’ve given up on being so secretive with our inner workings.
Online journals (or “blogs”) are sprouting up everywhere these days, but why exactly did this phenomenon come about? In the early nineties, Tim Berners-Lee started Web pages on which they shared what was new and going on in their lives and the world around them, also providing the readers with links to up-and-coming sites they found worth viewing on the Internet. When the Internet began to grow and actually produce more sites, more of these Web pages started springing up, but now the programmers behind them were dabbling and hand coding their pages with their recommended links and “filtering” the net. Finally, in 1998, the term that most of us are so familiar with today was coined when Jorn Barger thought of the brilliant “weblog.” Along with the birth of the term, the influx of new “webloggers” began, and this caused a new sensation: the weblog ring.
Since at the time, there was still a limited amount of webloggers online, weblog rings were not numerous. A weblog ring is basically a main weblog with links to various other weblogs that share a common interest or purpose, serving as somewhat of a home for similar people by providing them with new friends and possible opportunities for entrepreneurship.
As time went on, weblog was shortened to what we now know as blog, and sites devoted to providing people with easy-to-use blogs started to come about. In 1999, sites such as Blogger, Pitas and Diaryland made it fun and simple to create an online blog, even for the most computer-illiterate people. With the new blog sites opening for the public, blogs began to become more and more personal. Sites like LiveJournal.com and all of its copycats (Dead Journal, Greatest Journal, Xanga, etc.) were flooded with boys and girls, women and men, all looking for an escape for their thoughts and feelings, but also a place where they could get feedback from peers if they so wanted and it could remain, for the most part, anonymous.
Along with these new sites also came new communities, which for the most part are glorified blog rings. In communities, like blog rings, people with similar interests are brought together with everyone posting entries in the main blog or journal and becoming friends, or in some cases, enemies. It sounds like somewhat of a virtual high school, doesn’t it?
In the last few years, this trend has grown immensely, but I don’t foresee a halt anytime soon. Blogs are taking over the world. You cannot visit many sites without seeing a link to a journal, or maybe the site even has their own sort of mini journaling service (i.e. MySpace.com). Who knows what may come of this fad, but I’m sure we’ll find out in only a small matter of time.
