I was asked to teach a blogging 101 seminar at a local community college.  Most of it was just leading the participants through a WordPress process.  But below is what I wrote down for myself to talk about.

1. What is a Blog and what is Blogging.

A blog is a web log, a journal of some sort kept on the web. It entails a web site where you can publish entries that are time stamped (Usually the most recent is on top).

Blogging is a simpler way of saying, “I keep a blog,” the way people will say “I keep a diary.”

A blogger is a someone who has a blog.

Typically, a blog is thought of in a way that involves a website control panel that posts in a blog format.

2. The first blogs.

Of course, the first blogs did not have a customized blogging control panel. The first blogs were created by web savvy people who, instead of adding essays or articles or simply updating their home page, decided to start creating journal entries.

http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

In 1998 there were just a handful of sites of the type that are now identified as weblogs (so named by Jorn Barger in December 1997). Jesse James Garrett, editor of Infosift, began compiling a list of “other sites like his” as he found them in his travels around the web. In November of that year, he sent that list to Cameron Barrett. Cameron published the list on Camworld, and others maintaining similar sites began sending their URLs to him for inclusion on the list. Jesse’s ‘page of only weblogs‘ lists the 23 known to be in existence at the beginning of 1999.

Suddenly a community sprang up. It was easy to read all of the weblogs on Cameron’s list, and most interested people did. Peter Merholz announced in early 1999 that he was going to pronounce it ‘wee-blog’ and inevitably this was shortened to ‘blog’ with the weblog editor referred to as a ‘blogger.’

At this point, the bandwagon jumping began. More and more people began publishing their own weblogs. I began mine in April of 1999. Suddenly it became difficult to read every weblog every day, or even to keep track of all the new ones that were appearing. Cameron’s list grew so large that he began including only weblogs he actually followed himself. Other webloggers did the same. In early 1999 Brigitte Eaton compiled a list of every weblog she knew about and created the Eatonweb Portal. Brig evaluated all submissions by a simple criterion: that the site consist of dated entries. Webloggers debated what was and what was not a weblog, but since the Eatonweb Portal was the most complete listing of weblogs available, Brig’s inclusive definition prevailed.

This rapid growth continued steadily until July 1999 when Pitas, the first free build-your-own-weblog tool launched, and suddenly there were hundreds. In August, Pyra released Blogger, and Groksoup launched, and with the ease that these web-based tools provided, the bandwagon-jumping turned into an explosion. Late in 1999 software developer Dave Winer introduced Edit This Page, and Jeff A. Campbell launched Velocinews. All of these services are free, and all of them are designed to enable individuals to publish their own weblogs quickly and easily.

Pitas is still around but I had never head of it back when I started blogging in 1999. I learned blogging from a friend of mine who used blogger and the only other system I remember finding in the early days was http://diary-x.com (which was not be adu1t c0ntent beyond the writing of the bloggers themselves).

Blogger.com was a website from which you could send content to your homepage. However, they also offered free memberships on Blogspot.com so that anyone could start blogging right away. They tried to pay for the system by putting one single banner ad on the top of each blog.

This also became a way for people to naturally learn html. They learned both from their posts (using italics and embedding links) as well as from putting up links and pic in their sidebars. Until recently, blogger gave you access to the entire template including the css stylesheet which was included in the main page rather than a separate file like is done in most websites.

At some point early on, Upsaid appeared. They offered blogs for free but now charge $2 a month.

Not too long afterwards came Greymatter. This was open source software that you installed on your own website. It is still around (though I’m disappointed that the website uses orange).

Movable Type soon followed. Like Greymatter it was for those who owned a website, though it has been used by sites offering free blogs like Chattablogs.

I should meantion three blog systems that also appeared, though some of these tended to be seen as “virtual communities” along the lines of the later myspace.com rather than pure blogs. In a sense, I simply didn’t notice these because they seem to appeal to a younger user.

• Livejournal.com (Wikipedia entry) 1999
• Typepad.com 2005 — considered the largest paid blogging service in the world. I notice that lots of professionals use it, but since I never pay for this kind of thing, I am not one of them.
• Xanga.com (Wikipedia entry) 1998 as a music and book review community. I don’t have much knowledge of Xanga because I find it aesthetically painful whenever I visit.

3. Blogging Now

The most recent blogging news has been WordPress (both as a free blogging program and as a free site for blogging) and Blogger’s recent upgrade. WordPress.com is great, but it doesn’t allow you to “weaponize” your blog for income, nor to embed video. In both these cases the free account at blogger is better.

Other kinds of web logs have come into being. Audioblogging (see Hipcast.com) and vlogging on youtube are now possible. To an extent, these aren’t done that often because audio and video podcasting have also developed.

Google not only made the banner ad go away from blogspot.com, but they invented Adsense.com which enables you to put ads on your blog and get money from them. Some blogs have been highly successful. Dooce.com (no link due to content warning) was, last I heard, still able to pay their house mortgage with their revenues from blog advertizing.

See also, Text Link Ads.

Blogging was part of the move from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and it provided a market for a bunch of new services and social networking sites, like delicious, which has applications for blogs. Also, some services are specifically aimed at blogs, like Technorati.com. Other services have sprung up like Cocomment.com and specialized search engine features on google.

This has all lead to new ways of marketing. For more see Copyblogger.com, Problogger.com, and others.

Bulldog reporter:

Over lunch with a prominent PR industry blogger recently, he was lamenting that PR people seem hopelessly out of touch with today’s revolution in PR technology. I noted that PR practitioners had already missed one huge technology opportunity for lack of trying: Control of the corporate website. We had the chance to command this primary corporate communications tool, and we let it slip through our fingers. Today, we’re lucky if IT lets us have an online newsroom (and even most online newsrooms are embarrassingly effete).

Today we have a second chance. It’s an exciting and historically momentous time to be in the communications business. We now have the power to communicate our messages—in words, video and audio—to hundreds of millions of people around the globe in seconds. And those millions of people can communicate right back to us just as quickly. Interactive technology, broadband telecommunications, search, social media—these things are revolutionizing not only the way we communicate, but also how we function as communities and as a society. These technologies are beginning to affect profoundly the way we interact politically, socially and of course, commercially. As communicators, the question we should ask ourselves as we stand looking out on our profession’s horizon is: How has our experience prepared us for this moment in time, in history and this juncture in our professional lives?

Experience is a funny—deceptive—thing. Experience can provide you with a body of knowledge and received wisdom, and it can give you an intuitive sense of how to respond to the challenges springing up around you. As a general notion that’s good. But I’m starting to wonder if experience is always the most important quality we can bring to the table.

Blogging also promises to change the shape of intellectual interchange. Journals are still around and so is peer review. But now mavericks have a voice.