Blogging in the

contemporary era
MARCH 2021

BY
LAKKIMSETTY SIVA PRANATHI
[email protected]
What is blogging

Blogging is a web journaling practice in which writers express their personal or

professional opinions on a subject. It has come a long way since its start in 1993, as
shown by the fact that, according to a new survey, there will be more than 31 million
active bloggers in the United States by 2020.

Blogging started as personal diaries or web pages where people found comfort in
expressing their emotions and experiences. However, today's blogs are more than just
personal diaries; they're written to target an audience, promote products, and inform
people about news, gossip, and insightful information.

History of blogging

The early years (1993-1997)

Justin Hall, a Swarthmore College undergrad, was one of the first bloggers, who started
‘links.net’ in 1994 to publish his writing. He called it his "Personal Homepage". The
website was made up of short articles with shared links to his work and other websites.
The New York Times named him the "Founding Father of Personal Bloggers" ten years
after his start. Following in Justin's footsteps, dozens of new people began writing on a
variety of topics. These blogs were referred to as "Online Diaries" or "Personal Pages"
before the word "blog" was coined.

Jorn Barger, the brains behind the popular blog "Robot Wisdom," invented the word
"weblog" in 1997. The weblog was created by combining two words:’ log’, which refers
to written documentation, and ‘web’, which refers to the internet.

This ushered in a new period of blogging, spawning several of the new blogging sites.

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The growth years (1997-2002)

Bloggers had to write code for their websites in the beginning, uploading a new HTML
page to the server for each entry or updating the homepage with new links. The term
weblog was coined in december 1994 by John Barger, the creator of the website ‘robot
wisdom’
However, over time, tools streamlined the process and made it much easier for people
without programming experience to write blogs. Pitas, one of such tools, was released in
early 1999, followed by Metafilter, which enabled users to submit submissions for
publication on the Metafilter official site. The use of these tools demonstrated blogging's
increasing influence, laying the foundation for its evolution in the years after it became
mainstream.

Open Diary, a blogging site that enabled users to comment on each other's writing and
gave birth to the then-new trend of publishing readers' comments, was launched in 1998
by Claudio Pinhanez. In the same year, code-centric blogs gave way to more user-
friendly alternatives. As a result, Peter Merholz simplified and shortened the word
"weblog" to "blog."
Also, competitive blogging websites such as LiveJournal, Blogger and Xanga emerged
during the year. LiveJournal had separate text fields for a URL and text, this new
platform had a single open-text area. In the same year, Pyra Labs launched Blogger,
which was later bought by Google in 2003 and made free and open to all users. Leading
to the advent of the permanent link, it quickly has become the most successful and
popular of the early blogging tools.
In 2002, there was a surge in the number of parenting blogs, with Melinda Roberts
founder of TheMommyBlog.com being one of the first. Another significant event was the
introduction of Technorati, the first blog search engine.

Blogging reaches the mainstream (2003-2006)

In 2003, two more blogging services were launched, bringing blogging into the
mainstream of early modern society. TypePad, which manages blogs for major media

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organizations including the BBC, and WordPress, allows users to build and customize
their blogs. WordPress has grown to become the most widely used content management
service in the world.
Google released its two flagship apps, AdSense and AdWords, later that year. They made
it possible for people to incorporate ads for related goods and services into their blogs.
About this time, blogging had a huge influence on the world. Rather than watching
television, more people were turning to their favorite blogs for relevant information.

The video blog (2004)

When Steve Garfield posted short videos of demonstrations, marches, and news events
to his website in 2004, video blogs, or vlogs, became popular. 2004 was named the "Year
of the Video Blog," according to him. The next year, YouTube was released. After being
purchased by Google in 2006, it transitioned from a dating site to a video-sharing
website. It became extremely simple for people to upload and post their video blogs.
This changed the context of blogging, and the popularity of video blogging successfully
turned YouTube into one of the most popular websites on the internet.

Blogging and news (2005)

Over time, blogs have gained credibility, with some even transforming into full-fledged
news organizations. The Huffington Post, which began as a blog and has since grown
into a universally acknowledged news outlet, is a perfect example of this. The line
between blogging and news reporting became increasingly blurry as blogging gained
more popularity and credibility, and more cyber journalists began to blog about current
events. It became a meeting place for writers, editorialists, and bloggers, giving it the
appearance of a news organization.

The Microblogging era

Microblogging is a style of blogging that allows people to express their thoughts online.
A microblog varies from a conventional blog, here the content is usually smaller in size,
both in terms of actual and aggregated file size. The fact that microblogs "enable users to
share small elements of content such as short sentences, individual photographs, or
video links, which is the primary reason for their popularity.
When the blogosphere grew larger, a new form of blogging which is called microblogging
emerged. The start of Twitter in 2006, first as internal messenger service by Jack Dorsey,

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marked the beginning of microblogging. The origin of Twitter and its 140-character limit,
the availability of additional social media networking features helped this site gain
prominence. Tumblr was released later that year as the first official microblogging site,
allowing users to post short, multimedia-rich posts. It also made reposting and liking
other people's content a lot easier.
Communication became simpler than ever before, especially with the emergence of
microblogging sites and the development of existing blogging tools, and people began to
feel more secure about expressing themselves online. However, it resulted in hate
tweets and hurtful blog comments, leading Tim O'Reilly to create a Blogger's Code of
Conduct in 2007 in response to all of the hateful comments and articles.

Modern-day blogging

Since its start, blogging has continued to expand at a steady pace. When ‘Medium’ was
launched in 2012 by Evan William who is the co-founder of Pyra Lab, where the blogging
paradigm shifted. It's a blog-publishing site that caters to both beginners and
experienced authors. The distinction between a blog and a news website is blurred like
Huffington Post and Buzzfeed.
LinkedIn launched a similar blogging site called Pulse for select users in 2013, which was
later made open to all in 2015. B2B brands and business professionals who use Linkedin
are the most popular users of Pulse. Although Medium and Pulse cannot assign domain
names to users in the same way that WordPress and Tumblr do, they allow bloggers to
share their content with a larger audience.

By 2016, the world of blogging was popular and successful, WordPress took advantage
of the opportunity to add the. blog extension to its list of URLs. This meant that, in
addition to other IP addresses like.com,.net, and.org, people could now choose an IP
address with the. blog extension. WordPress users have created over 70.5 million new
blog posts and 52 million new comments per month in recent years.

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Blogging is now the most important aspect of every company's marketing and content
plan to reach out to its target audience with a persuasive and relatable brand message.
According to studies, marketers who prioritize blogging as part of their marketing plan
are 13 times more likely to see a positive return on investment.
Vlogs and podcasts, which now account for a large portion of the blogging community,
have risen in popularity as a result of the growth of social media. Many bloggers are
using platforms like Tumblr, Facebook Live, Snapchat Stories, and Instagram Stories to
create multimedia content.

How blogging has changed our world

Blogging has evolved significantly over time. However, the central feature of a blog has
not changed. Blogs continue to be a place for people to build and post whatever content
they want, as well as a source of entertainment for internet users all over the world.
The fact that blogs have grown in popularity in such a short time and have weathered so
many changes demonstrates the platform's resilience. Blogs help to fulfill the basic
human need to communicate with other people, as well as contributing to the
development of the online environment.
Here is how the evolution of blogging and new media technology has changed the world
of communications

Blogs and Social Media

The second generation of the Internet and web-based technologies, characterized by a

more dynamic platform through which internet users can interact and engage with other
users, has organically developed from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, also known as "new media,"
which is described as the second generation of the Internet and web-based technologies,
characterized by a more dynamic platform through which internet users can interact and
engage with other users. Social activism has been reinvented as a result of the
emergence of mass media and creativity in social media tools. The conventional
relationship between political authority and the public has been altered by blogging sites

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and Social Networking Sites (SNS) like Facebook, Twitter, making it easier for the
marginalized to cooperate, organize, and communicate their voice and demands.

The ability to emerge web-based technology to involve people in collective endeavors

and to prompt new ways of organizing knowledge is their greatest potential. Social
media has undeniably altered the face of mass communication, and as a result, it can
establish a powerful public sphere. As a result, social media plays a critical role in
growing political engagement and advocacy. Social networking is increasingly recognized
as a promising medium for changing the type of information, speeding up information
delivery, and increasing the level of information generation, distribution, and
consumption in a world of co-creation.

Blogging as a new form of citizen journalism

According to J.D.Lasica, senior editor of Online Journalism Review, “weblog is a

grassroots phenomenon that may sow the seeds for new forms of journalism, public
discourse, interactivity, and online community”.

Earlier models of journalism, in which the newsgathering process is highly centralized

and supervised authority is solely held by credentialed professional journalists, and
public feedback is limited to token measures such as the Letters to the Editor page, to
more accessible, interactive, and fluid models, in which the number of published writers
grows exponentially and users are constantly participating in news production processes,
questioning the two-tier dichotomy of "mainstream" and "alternative" news and
journalism.

The emergence of user-generated media challenged the foundations of media

dominance inherent in monopoly control over resources and infrastructure, resulting in
new sources of influence, as well as new forms of creating and disseminating
information.

Citizen journalism is a 21st-century phenomenon that arose at the convergence of the

Internet and modern media technology, a perceived crisis in news values and
professional journalism, and the desire for online engagement, social networking, self-
expression, and interaction, all of which are characteristics of the age of "Web 2.0" or
the "participative Web." With the advent of blogging , microblogging and social media ,

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people started to share not only their personal lifes but also their personal opinion on
each and every aspect of society globally. This new hybrid type of media consumption-
production would question the entrenched division of labour (producers of stories
versus consumers of stories) that is at the heart of media control. The right of everyone
not only to express but also to circulate knowledge and views that they actually hold is
an affordance that is increasingly allowed in this modern socio-technical world, as new
media technology is creating ‘a culture in which “everyone is a journalist” or can be'.

The Influence of blogs on purchase decisions

Blogs are ranked as the third most effective online tool for influencing purchasing
decisions. Retail and brand pages are the most prominent, but blogs are more popular
than Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, forums, and online magazines. The third most
powerful online method for shaping buying decisions is blogs. The most common sites
are retail and brand pages, but blogs outnumber Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, forums,
and online magazines.
According to data from a Research Now survey, nearly nine out of ten customers (84%)
make purchases after reading about a product or service on a blog. Blogs were classified
as the most valuable source of knowledge for purchasing for between the ages of 18 and
34.

The future of blogging

Blogs were becoming the primary means of networking for individuals online eight to ten
years ago. However, in the last five years, with the rise of social media and social
networking, blogs have also become a small part of an individual's online identity.
Vlogs and podcasts have also become more common in the blogosphere, with many
bloggers preferring to use multimedia material. Tumblr and Posterous, two services that
cater to these types of posts, are likely to continue to rise in popularity. With new
services like Quora entering the market, there's a chance that the blogosphere will
diminish and more people will turn to these sites for details. However, services like
Quora can be useful tools for bloggers because they reveal what people really want to
know about a subject.

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Blogs are unlikely to become obsolete in the near future. However, there is plenty of
space for improvement and creativity in terms of how their content is discovered,
distributed, and accessed.

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