Blogging And What’s Next

By Blundstone Osterberger

Blundstone Osterberger, Manager, Technology and Innovation Group, talks about the history of blogging, what it really is, and what will happen next!

To many of us, blogging is still a strange phenomenon. We've been excited by it in the mass media. We’ve heard the stories of bloggers taking on large corporations and winning their quests for better products and the ‘revolution of grassroots media’ and all that comes along with it.

In order to better guess what's next, we need to take a closer look at what blogging really is, and it's history.

Back in 1997, a guy named Jorn Barger came up with the word ‘weblog’ to describe a per- sonal website kept in a diary-like manner. Only a couple of years later, a blogger called Brad Fitzpatrick, started Livejournal. In few months a small San Francisco startup named Pyra Labs started offering a service called ‘Blogger’. Blogger and Livejournal were tools that made it super simple to create, edit and maintain a small website and post frequent content. While this wasn't exactly new, these services did one thing - they made having your own website easy. The barriers were broken down.

With small improvements to the technology, blogging suddenly became not just broadcast- ing, but conversation. People who read your blog could comment and feedback. You could link to other people's blogs, and trackback would show you who linked to your blog.

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