Blog

The earliest blogs (short for “weblogs”) were Web pages made up of short, regularly updated posts that usually included hypertext links to Web sites or to online news and information that caught the author's (or “blogger's”) interest, attention, or imagination. As the practice of blogging caught on in the late 1990s, the genre expanded to include online journals comprising topical entries about daily events, both public and private. The category has grown broad enough to include sites ranging from personal journals about college dorm life to the Drudge Report, which includes links to a variety of tabloid news and gossip items. Some sites are the product of one or two authors, while others incorporate the contributions of a group of bloggers. Weblogger Jorn Barger is generally credited with coining the term “weblog” to describe the emerging genre.

What unites the various blog formats is the fact that they provide a means of “pre-surfing” the Internet—a necessary function, perhaps, as the number of sites and the amount of information continues to increase. The blog format reflects the time-sensitive nature of the genre, featuring the most recent posts (often dated) at the top, with preceding posts following in reverse chronological order.

Blogs tend to express the interests and personalities of their authors, both through the choice of links and through the short (often sarcastic or witty) observations and summaries that accompany the links. Thus, a blog serves not only as a record of found links, but also as a way for visitors to rely on someone, whose distinctive personality and set of interests may resonate with theirs, to scout online content for them. In this respect, blogs formalize the process through which Internet users swap the URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) for interesting sites. However, rather than merely pointing to Web sites of interest, bloggers generally provide “deep” links to particular items within a site.

The existence of blogs predates the coining of the term. Weblogs first started appearing in the mid-1990s, as Web surfers sought ways to assemble the information they had garnered online. A site called “Links from Underground,” authored by college student Justin Hall in 1994, is an early example of a site that shared assembled links with online visitors. An even earlier precursor was the National Center for Supercomputing Applications' “What's New” site, which served as a bulletin board of links on topics [Page 34]ranging from technical developments in networked computing to favorite sites for news, research information, and even culinary tips.

Until recently, it was relatively easy to keep up with the various bloggers and their respective personalities and interests. Rebecca Blood's online history of blogs notes that by 1998, one of the first lists of blogs included only 23 pages. Within a few years, however, the number of blogs had increased to the point where the Blogger Web site, which provides software for blog authors, boasted 150,000 registered users. As the trend continues to expand, readers may well need a meta-level of blogs to pre-surf the booming number of individual blogs. This proliferation reflects not just the broadening of Web literacy and access to the Internet, but also the media attention that blogs have recently received, as well as the development of free, do-it-yourself blog tools, including both Blogger and Pitas. Originally deeply embedded in the Web-surfing culture and limited largely to those immersed in the online world (not least because early bloggers often worked in computer-related fields), blogs have gone mainstream with the advent of sites hosted by newspapers, including the San Jose Mercury News and the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

...