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...