Happy Blogiversary!
July 17th, 2007 by DianeIf you had to guess, how “old” would you say the practice of blogging is?
For sure, I’d guess at least five years. Well I’m off a fair bit - double that. According to this article in the Wall Street journal:
We are approaching a decade since the first blogger — regarded by many to be Jorn Barger — began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary. On Dec. 23, 1997, on his site, Robot Wisdom, Mr. Barger wrote: “I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis,” and the Oxford English Dictionary regards this as the primordial root of the word “weblog.”
The article goes on to mention that David Winer, who blogged with Scripting News, and Cameron Barrett, who started CamWorld were also early adopters of this new form of journalism/editorialism. In fact when I searched for CamWorld to find the link to insert here, I came across this entry, posted July 11, CamWorld Turns Ten. It’s a fascinating post. In it Barrett states:
Ten years ago today I sat down at my trusty Apple PowerMac 7100 (66 Mhz), fired up a text editor and wrote the very first entry of this weblog. It said simply, “Life is a constant challenge.”
There was no further explanation, no diatribe about the turmoil my life was in at the time, no links to web design and HTML resources elsewhere on the web, no opinion about politics, no product reviews or endorsements. It was simply a cheap rhetorical statement thrown out into the growing thing which soon acquired a name: the blogosphere.
Barrett goes on to describe how much a part of his life blogging has become and how his blog has chronicled major events in life, including his claim that he was the first person to ever get fired over a blog. He also added that although blogging is still important to him, personal and work commitments keep him from writing as much as he’d like.
I’m not going to summarize any more of the Wall Street Journal article here. It’s a fascinating read, with a dozen brief meditations by people, (such as Mia Farrow, Newt Gingrich and Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner), from a variety of walks of life on what the blog has come to mean to them. Pour the beverage of your choice, relax and check it out for yourself!
There are a few videos embedded in the article as well. This one resonated so much with me, I felt compelled to embed it here, as opposed to simply pointing to it.
In the video, Cory Doctorow and David Pescovitz of BoingBoing.net talk about how they come up with ideas for their blog posts. They simply write about the topics they are passionate about. They don’t claim to be “experts” on these topics. They know that with the size and diversity of their readership, there will always be readers who are “smarter than they are”. Their readers, who are also passionate about the topic, (or they wouldn’t have made their way there), will correct any inaccuracies or misconceptions in the post, answer questions the bloggers may have asked, or just add to their depth of understanding. In fact Doctorow says that often they end up collaborating with the people they are writing about.
I’ve watched the video several times now. To me it really drives home the critical role the reader has in blogging. The onus is on the reader to not only make meaning from the text, but to contribute to the text. If David Warlick were ever to read this post, I imagine he’d say, yes, that’s part of the new literacy I’ve been talking about. Well David, I think I get it!
Technorati Tags: blogging blogiversary Wall Street Journal VARADARAJAN literacy Warlick
Image Citation
The New York Times Online. Happy Blogiversary.” TUNKU VARADARAJAN. 14 July 2007. 17 Jul 2007
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