A Brief History of Blogging

1
A Brief History of Blogging

• Mark Tremayne
• Assistant Professor
• School of Journalism
• University of Texas at Austin

2
What is a Blog?

• According to blog veteran Rebecca Blood
• John Barger coined the term weblog in December,
  1997
• As of 1998 there were only a few in existence
• In 1999 Weblogger Peter Merholz decided to call
  the growing collection of sites wee-blogs
• This caught on and was shortened to blogs

3
Blog Explosion

• In 1999 pitas.com began offering a free
  build-your-own-blog software
• Pyra.com, blogger.com, and groksoup.com followed
  later that year
• By 2000 there were thousands of blogs

4
What do they look like?

• They typically appear as a long column of date
  entries in reverse chronology.
• Some are personal in nature and are written in a
  very informal style.
• Others engaged in discussion of current events
  writing is often more professional
• Links to source material and stories on
  traditional media web sites are common
• Some blogs allow readers to post their own
  responses to the bloggers entries

5
Questions raised by this phenomena

• Is blogging journalism?
• Do traditional journalists and amateur bloggers
  go about their work in similar ways?
• Can a news employee run his or her own personal
  blog (and not get fired)?
• Should traditional media outlets use the blog
  style and what are the ramifications of this if
  they do?