A Brief History of Blogging


The Web was designed for academic use, as a way for university folks to share content with each other. Web founder Tim Berners-Lee wanted content to be editable. After all, a collaborative medium demanded editability. And being academic, it was text-only.

Then the Web reached the US. With that, its usage exploded, writes Walter Isaacson in his book, Innovators. But it also went commercial. Marc Andreesen wrote the first sexy browser, Mosaic that enabled display of images, “multimedia and ornamental fonts” on web pages. But editing was no longer supported (harder with all that multimedia!). That very support for jazzy styles and pics attracted media companies onto the Web. Posting their content online would attract even more advertisers, they reasoned. And as commercial content began to dominate the Web, the need to edit content fell through the floor.

A college kid named Justin Hall started posting a “running Web log of his personal activities, random thoughts, deep musings and intimate encounters”. He even offered to teach others how to write content in HTML format. Many took up his offer and Web logs grew in popularity. So much so that in 1997, John Barger joint the words and coined the term “weblog”. Peter Merholz jokingly wrote that the rate at which weblogs were growing warranted a split back into 2 words, but in a different way: “we blog”. And that is how the term “blog” came to be…

But in 1999, blogs still had a huge constraint:
“To publish and maintain an independent blog required some coding skills and access to a server.”
Enter Ev Williams. He wrote a tool that could convert content written in most common formats (e.g. Notepad, Word etc) into Web (HTML) format and provided a server to host content. He launched it as a product named (what else?) Blogger. It was a runaway hit: by the end of 2000, Blogger had 100,000 accounts.

Popular though it was, Blogger made little revenue. Requests for voluntary donations brought in very little. On his own blog, Williams posted:
“We are out of money, and I have lost my team…”
Dan Bricklin, co-founder of VisiCalc (a spreadsheet like MS Excel), heard of Williams’ plight and offered to help by licensing Blogger software. Bricklin was paying it forward: when his company was in dire straits, a competitor, Mitch Kapor from Lotus (another spreadsheet) had helped keep VisiCalc solvent.

Things began to turn around in 2002. With the launch of Blogger Pro (a paid version) and blogging exploding world over, Blogger was suddenly a hot commodity. And so when Google offered to buy Blogger, Williams said Yes. Money would never be a problem again…

(In case you were wondering, yes, this blog is published on Blogger.)

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarSeptember 21, 2018 at 4:25 PM

    Very interesting!

    You must continue to provide info like this in your blogs. Of course, at regular intervals our little VIP needs to make her appearance too! :-)

    ReplyDelete

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