By Lauren Paige
Within the past two years there has been an incredible wave of interest in blogging. In 1994, online diaries such as Justin Hall's could be found on the web. Similar to the weblogs of today, Hall's site told readers "how long it had been since he last had sex or what drugs he had taken that day" (Tweney 1). Today, blogs are more interested in informing the reader on the latest news or business transactions. Jesse James Garrett, editor of Infosift, began the contemporary version of weblogs when he "began compiling a list of other sites like his as he found them in his travels around the web" (Blood 1). This started the common trend of a blogger linking to other blogsites that he or she commonly reads.
The name 'blog' was derived from 'weblog' (the words 'web' and 'log'). Peter Merholz decided to pronounce it 'wee-blog' in 1999. This was quickly shortened to 'blog' as the term 'blogger' arose. In the same year Eatonweb Portal was created by Brigitte Eaton. She followed Garrett's idea of compiling a list of every weblog she was aware of. This site contained a new feature, dated entries (Blood 1). Now, blogs are not only dated, but they also contain a time stamp. This provides the reader the luxury of knowing exactly how current the information is. One way blogs were popularized was through people posting about the September 11th tragedy. Bloggers were able to post experiences and opinions as a way to cope with their troubles (Butcher 1). The growth of blogging continued to flourish with the development of Pitas. Created in July of 1999, Pitas was the first site where net users could build their own weblogs for free. This trend caught on and several other sites were started, such as Blogger and Groksoup (Blood 1). Now, "the community pivot point is Blogger" (McCarthy 1).
Although "blogs started as online diaries published daily by Web developers who wanted to share their observations with others as they worked," they now have many more uses. Blogs can be message boards, functioning business tools, and news updating sites (McCarthy 1). As Henry Jenkins puts it, "Bloggers are turning into the hunting and gathering, sampling and critiquing [what] the rest of us do online." He says that regular net users surf the Web, but bloggers snowboard it (1).
