IDEA No 49
BLOGGING
In 1994, Dave Winer started DaveNet, an email newsletter that discussed the latest developments in the computer industry. Frustrated with the lack of coverage his software company received in the trade press, Winer saw DaveNet as an opportunity to bypass mainstream media.
The infamous blog ‘Diary of a London Call Girl’ was voted Blog of the Year by The Guardian newspaper in 2003 and spawned the book The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl.
The flagship product of Winer’s company was Frontier, an early scripting language for the Mac. By 1996 it had evolved into software for the creation of websites. Winer used it to create and manage his own website – Scripting News – which continued where DaveNet left off.
Winer’s daily updates attracted an audience of like-minded people. One of these people was Jorn Barger, who adopted Frontier to manage his own website, Robot Wisdom. In December 1997, Barger began posting daily entries on his website and started referring to it as a ‘web log’. His prolific postings, on everything from artificial intelligence to Kate Bush, gained global attention. It was not long before the term web log was adopted by other people to describe their daily musings. In 1999, Peter Merholz jokingly wrote it as ‘we blog’ on his website. Regularly updated web journals have been known as ‘blogs’ ever since.
Early blogs were simply regularly updated websites. The emergence of specific blogging platforms, such as Blogger, Open Diary and LiveJournal, standardized the format. Articles are usually posted in reverse chronological order, visitors are able to leave comments, and links to other blogs are encouraged.
Blogs are written by people from all walks of life, from politicians to call girls. Whatever the subject, informal, peer-produced content now sits alongside professional journalism. Consumers have become producers. With that comes a shift in the balance of power. Governments, brands and the media have to forge more equitable relationships with their audiences. Increased choice and variety of views can only be a good thing.
Blogging has reinvented a media landscape previously dominated by the mass-media broadcast industry. People now have more sources from which to obtain their news. Sites like Scripting News and Robot Wisdom were trailblazers for citizen journalism, self-publishing and pretty much everything else we now refer to as social media. They have been instrumental in helping the Web become the participatory medium it was always envisioned to be. And hallelujah to that.■
‘Sites like Scripting News and Robot Wisdom were trailblazers for what we now refer to as social media’
Lina Ben Mhenni’s blog, A Tunisian Girl, documented the Tunisian Revolution and continues to speak out against political corruption in Tunisia.
The home page of the Tunisian Girl blog.