Blogs sprang into existence in 1994, now in 2021, there are over 600 million blogs on the internet. That’s around half of the websites that exist! But where did blogging begin and what does blogging look like now?

It’s no surprise that blogging has erupted into such a major phenomenon; it enables you to share and connect with people across the globe, after all. The first blog is generally credited to a university undergraduate, but his blog was very different to the blogs that you and me peruse today. Whilst we are likely to use content management systems such as wordpress.com, these systems were not available then, with the first resources for bloggers only emerging in the latter half of the 90s. 

Open Diary was one of the first resources that was created for bloggers when it launched in 1998. It allowed members of the community to comment on other member’s content - this was pivotal as the first time that this sort of interaction was made available. More and more content management systems of this kind burst onto the scene in these early pivotal years, creating a framework for what blogging would become in years to come.

The 2000s were massive for blogging. This is the period in which blogging burst into the mainstream and became more familiar to the blogging of today. 2002 saw blogger Heather B. Armstrong be fired for content on her personal blog that mentioned her colleagues. This, obviously, ignited a fierce debate surrounding the privacy and freedom of expression for bloggers. In 2003 Wordpress, the content management system that I first used as a young blogger many years ago, was launched. This was also the period in which the lines between blogger and journalist began to blur. Think of sites such as the Huffington Post, if you visit that site it appears to be a news outlet - but it in fact started out as a blog!

The earliest video blogs were launched in 2000, but bloggers had to wait another five years before video content to become commonplace. The sheer scale of the eruption of the popularity of video blogging is most likely due to the rebrand of YouTube, four months after its launch in February 2005. A little fun fact, YouTube originally was created as a dating site! Clearly that didn’t last long… 

In 2006 and 2007 respectively, Twitter and Tumblr launched onto the blogging sphere. These platforms challenged the traditional blogging that existed up until then, promoting the sharing of content in small formats. This is called microblogging. Yes! Twitter is a microblogging service, more so than a social media site!

With the advent of blogging came the advent of the trolls. The internet allows a sense of anonymity that seems to bring out the worst in some. Unfortunately, trolls and negative comments are not something that can be entirely rid of! For now, its up to bloggers to moderate their own comments and try not to not let the haters bring them down. After all, if you’ve created a blog and are dedicated enough to be posting continuously… Screw what anyone says, I applaud you!