Private goes public: the history of the blog

by Alexandra Piotrowski

Summer conjures up images of sunny beaches, new friends and spontaneous fun. A barbeque one weekend, winging it to Europe the next. More often than not, though, we find ourselves parked in front of the computer, looking at cats on YouTube. If you’re looking for more scintillating fare, our lady in Long Beach penned a primer on the history of the blog. She was also kind enough to provide some recommendations.

Entertainment has evolved for as long as humans have. We used to find amusement in gladiator’s battles, the poetry reading of bards, theatre, literature. Then came technology and the marvel of radio, and then of course, video killed the radio star, and now we’re spiraling to a world where entertainment exists not just on a big screen at home, but on a very small, very portable screen that lets you peer into the infinite and thus infinitely entertaining world of the internet.

The average American spends six hours on the computer and the internet daily, and two more hours can be tacked on to that number thanks to mobile communication devices like your iPhone, Droid or Crackberry. With this statistic being as high as it is, its not wonder that the internet is more than binary code scampering across a flickering screen, it’s a virtual universe. And as with all new frontiers, the internet has more then a few willing settlers. Most can’t say why they want to stake a claim in the infinite available space that is the world wide web, but by god, the desire is there and it is strong. Thus begins the tale of how the realm of personal websites, blogs as we know them, came to be.

‘Blogs’ is, if you remember, an abbreviation for ‘web logs,’ and they remain one of the most accessible ways to carve a niche out for yourself in the vast world of the net. Since most blog hosting sites are free and readily available, Technorati estimates there are 112.8 million blogs out there. Blogger, WordPress, Livejournal, Tumblr are all well known blog hosting sites, and they are so highly trafficked that it’s estimated a new blog is created every half a second. There are a few which have made it to pop culture relevance, a lot of which have been abandoned by their administrators, and most of which are unknown personally-designed public spaces of little to no importance for anyone but the writer and a handful of patrons.

There are a number of blogs that are more renowned than others, web based journals and virtual discourses that have seeped into our collective consciousness and get as many or more hits than establishment websites. What started out as a progressive discussion forum in 2005, The Huffington Post now receives 22 million hits per month, employs a full staff comparable to a paper publication and has been called the most powerful blog in the world by The Observer. It seems many influential blogs started during this time – Lifehacker, Treehugger and TMZ.com all were launched in 2005. And many have done incredibly well for themselves, transforming a hobby that basically consists of journaling in a public forum into a very valid career path. Scott Schuman started a photo blog that centered on street style shots of New York natives in 2005. In 2010, thesartorialist.com is considered one of Time Magazine’s top 100 design influencers, has published a book, and has had successful collaborations with the likes of Burberry, Style.com and American Vogue. Mario Lavandeira set up an office in a Los Angeles Coffee Bean in 2004 and, after dying his hair Technicolor and changing his name to Perez Hilton, has cracked his way into the showbiz world of celebrity overexposure and is now (heaven help us all) a household name. Heather Armstrong launched her blog, dooce.com, in 2001, and has chronicled the last decade of her life (including the loss of her job, which happened because of her blog), as well as published two books and been named the #26 Most Influential Woman in Media by Forbes.

With such an expansive resource as the internet, its easy to see the appeal of blogs while feeling a shadow of overexposure and intimidation. There are simply too many subjects to explore, too many images to look at, too many opinions to take into consideration out there. Those that follow blogs and those that blog themselves can surely agree, its easy to fall down the rabbit hole of personal information and not emerge for hours. The innate thing about seeking out relevant information on the internet is that you will not find a shortage of it, ever. Blogs contribute to the constant supply of information and interesting trivia available, and the instantaneous gratification nature of them makes their exploration as gratifying, if not more so, than television or other, more interactive forms of entertainment.

Allie’s Blog Recommendations