All handicaps about the blog's development history

Today, in 2016, I blogged to make a living - a great job after having gone through a long journey of learning, training and effort. If you can't conquer the road with so many turns, I can't be here to share with you the history of the blog.

We all know that like many other things being used today, the blog also has a very interesting history behind its development. According to a recently discovered document (which I will share later for you) the first blog posts appeared around 1994. Compared to now, they are very different. , including names and meanings.

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According to Merriam Webster , blogs are defined as "a website that people write about their personal views and share their activities and experiences." Before going into this concept, let's first take a look at some of the following issues.

The original name of the blog

When it was born, the blog was called by some slang names like "weblog", "personal web page" (private website) and "online diary" ( online diary ). Today, people simply call it "blog".

However, in terms of meaning, the purpose of blogging has changed. Currently, bloggers have a lot of platforms and formats to design their own websites and there is no longer a fixed standard of blogging.

The names "weblog", "personal web page" and "online diary" are based on the purpose that people often use blogs: personal websites or diaries. As you can see below, this word is basically derived from the idea of ​​an online book. Besides, at the time of birth, blogging has certain limitations and the content is mainly for web (only-web).

History of blogging

1994 - 1997: Beginning stage

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There is still a lot of controversy regarding the early stage of blogging, such as the first half of the 19th century, there were not many online archives and most blog posts at the time. can be saved but currently, cannot know the exact location to search.

Many bloggers who appeared during this period were unable to make money from blogging, but they were the first to understand the value of the World Wide Web in the 1980s. One of them was Justin Hall - born Swarthmore College member - who created the links.net website in January 1994. Basically, it is a page that evaluates HTML interfaces that Hall got ideas from many other online links, but that achievement is enough for the New York Times Magazine to "give him the title " the father of the personal blog".

"When I started blogging, people called it a personal website," Hall said, "then they said I was one of the first weblog writers and now I am one of the first bloggers. First of history ".

That same year, Claudio Pinhanez (who is now a senior manager of social data analysis - Social Data Analytics at IBM) started storing his short articles on a website he called "Open." Diary " - open diary.

However, it was not until December 1996 that the term "weblog" began to appear. The name was initiated by Jorn Barger - the creator of the Wisdom Robot website, pioneering the use of "weblog" to describe a " log " of his online activity - like Hall's work. once worked in 1994 - much like a list of links that the Barger has ever visited.

These events may have sparked a new era of blogging and proved less than a year later, many platforms dedicated to bloggers have appeared massively.

1998 2001: The emergence of support resources for bloggers

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The latter part of the 19th century saw a very rapid increase in the resources created just for bloggers. For example, the Open Diary was released in October 1998 and quickly became one of the strongest blogging platforms. As its name suggests, Open Diary is an open community and is also the first platform to use the membership model to allow participants to comment on other people's posts.

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In 1999 (this time not really accurate), programmer Peter Merholz (who later became the design manager at Groupon, OpenTable and Jawbone and many other design firms) shortened the name "weblog" becomes "blog".

This is considered part of a phase where opportunities for extremely large bloggers with each platform strive to set up different sets of features to cater to certain users. . In 1999 alone, the Blogger community experienced some "quality" platforms like Blogger (later acquired by Google), LiveJournal and Xanga.

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Xanga (Biz Stone - co-founder of Twitter who used to be the creative director of this blog platform) was originally a social networking site, sometimes compared to MySpace. By 2000, this website began adding new features for users who wanted to blog.

This period also witnessed some rumors about the emergence of blogs in the form of videos (video blogs). In January 2000, a man named Adam Kontras attached a video of his activities to a blog post to share with family and friends. Also in November, Professor Adrian Miles posted a video with a change of text on a still image and named "vog" referring to his video blog.

In the late 19th century, blogging began to have a significant impact on the lives of many people. People started looking for ways to make money from their blogs and this is also the time to mark a new development of blogging: blogs become a "fertile land" for business and bloggers are also valued. than before.

2002: A "great" year of blogging

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In the early 2000s, several very significant events established the "golden age" of blogging. In particular, in February 2002, Technorati - one of the first blog search engines (currently, the company of advertising technology experts) was officially available in the market.

That same month, blogger Heather B. Armstrong was fired for posting articles criticizing colleagues on his personal page: Dooce.com. Although it is unclear whether this is the first blogger to be "accused" by his own articles, it has raised a question about privacy and freedom to express personal thoughts of bloggers.

In 2002, Mommy Bloggers appeared with articles by mothers who shared parenting. Later, Melinda Roberts also founded TheMommyBlog.com - one of the world's first moms blogs.

In May 2002, Newsweek predicted that the blog would replace traditional media. In August, Blog Ads was operated by Pressflex LLC. Less than a year later, Google launched AdSense - a "pairing" service with blogs through related ads (as per the bloggers' wishes). The appearance of blog ads can be seen as a big turning point for bloggers because this helps them to make money from articles, and is sponsored by big brands that blog content is appropriate. with their strategy or getting free products when writing reviews or endorsements (using the influence of blogs to create brand-specific articles to impact people use the product).

Blogging has started to become a huge money-making opportunity that bloggers used to consider this as a hobby.

In December 2002, Gawker - a blog reviewed by the New York Times magazine as a "pioneer" for "gossip" blogs. However, in August 2016, Gawker was forced to close due to some legal disputes.

2003: Growth momentum is sustained

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In 2003, TypePad and WordPress launched, adding to the collection of platforms for bloggers to choose from. In the same year, live blogging (a live blog is a post that constantly updates the content associated with a specific timeline for a certain event, similar to live radio and live TV) appears and The Guardian is one of the first newspapers to take advantage of this form to update answers during the questioning of the minister. The BBC considers live blogging as "live text" and often uses it for sporting events.

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In February, 203, Google acquired Pyra Labs - a blog publishing system and this event is a sign of the strong development of blogging, especially when blog monetization has been initiated from years earlier.

The early 2000 period also saw the first signs of the emergence of political blogs. For example, in 2003, many well-known media outlets encouraged employees and commentators "to play cyber journalists" in search of views shared by bloggers. Prestige and competitive hits with other newspapers.

2004 - 2005: Videos and press releases

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Although the earliest video blogs were shot in 2000, it was not until this stage that visual content actually got the chance to "bear fruit." In February 2004, videographer (film production photographer) Steve Garfield - who later became one of the first Web video bloggers - announced that 2004 was the "year of video blogging".

And yes, just 2 years later, YouTube appeared, shortly after that, this website began to invite users to upload their own videos. However, different from the present, at that time, YouTube was like a dating site - where singles could use videos to introduce themselves and share the standards of love for each other first. when starting a real relationship.

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However, when focusing on downloading videos with more popular content (June 2005), YouTube has received growing trust from users. In addition, the rich resource used to be reserved only for writers, developers also began to target other content creators.

Some time later, the gap between news and blogging articles also began to be removed, contributing to the launch of the Huffington Post . Currently, the Huffington Post becomes one of the most powerful "content aggregator" sites.

One of the Huffington Post's "fathers", Jonah Peretti, later joined BuzzFeed as a co-founder. Although in essence, BuzzFeed is not a content aggregator but it also serves as "a global, multi-platform network for news and entertainment" - including a variety of content and despite having a team private editor but anyone can post posts on BuzzFeed.

The emergence of a series of these newer platforms raises a question: "Where is the report, what is the blog?" Even after entering the 21st century, no one has ever been able to give the correct answer.

2006 - 2007: The explosion of microblogging (microblog) and rules

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Appeared with 140 characters (or less) in March 2016 when the co-founder and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet to the world, microblog - the official blog was born. Basically, microblogging is a place to share stories, news and other forms of content with the smallest possible format.

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Microblogging continued to achieve strong growth in February 2007 with the birth of Tumblr - another blog platform that prompted users to shorten content. According to former CNET reporter Josh Lowenshon, the appearance of these websites makes "people who feel they don't know what to write or don't have enough time to write a long article, they can still share photos, videos and links. ".

However, the emergence of such a form of short, real-time information sharing also leads to an increase in visceral communication. Specifically, countless malicious tweets are posted along with a lot of critical comments, threats appear below the posts on personal blogs. Before this situation, the rules were also established:

1. Responsible not only for your posts but also for comments that you allow users to leave under each of your posts.
2. Set the level of tolerance for comments that are humiliating and malicious.
3. Consider removing all anonymous user comments, unclear personal information.
4. Eliminate all forms of "trolls" (acts of teasing, teasing, talking bad, hoaxing .)
5. Meet in person, send a message or search for an intermediary who plays a mediator role when a conflict occurs.
6. If you know someone who acts badly, warn them.
7. Don't say anything online that you won't say even when you meet directly.

The introduction of these rules has shown a huge development of the blogger community since the introduction of the Open Diary platform in 1998. In order for blog comments to be more informative and informative. and to avoid conflict, in 2013, the Huffington Post finally put rule 3 into code of conduct, removing all anonymous comments and asking the commenters to link their feedback to your Facebook profile.

2008 - 2011: "Quiet years" of the blog

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In this 4-year period, there are not many attractive events that motivate people to write blogs. Except, January February, the White House blog was born and later that year, the movie Julie & Julia (The Story of Two Chefs) was officially released following the success of a food blogger. and the film's content is inspired by a book of articles posted on this blog. The famous blogger has marked the development of popular culture that has an impact on the success of professional bloggers, contributing to inspire other bloggers. By 2010, 11% of bloggers reported their main income came mainly from blogging.

In 2001, Google also made a few changes that impacted blogger, which is the Panda algorithm update that aims to lower the ranking of sites that Moz calls "thin content", without depth. and less attractive. This has affected bloggers who created content that Google rated low quality as well as lack of inbound links (back links) - links from one website to another. The lack of linking sites other than blogs also makes Google's algorithm evaluate unreliable blogs.

2012: Medium was born

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August 2012 co-founder of Pyra Labs - Blogger creator - Evan Williams created Medium : one of the largest blogging platforms.

Currently, Medium is different from before. Specifically, people can create accounts on this website and start writing and sharing original content like other blogging platforms. However, Medium continues to blur the line between news articles and blog posts. In fact, Medium introduced it as a website that provides "imaginative daily news, directly from those who created it and live with it."

This is a remarkable Decentralized Content preamble (Distributed / Decentralized Content) : A term that allows users to share their products that have been published in other newspapers or posted on a content creation platform. It is different from sharing links on social networks - where the content displayed is limited. Instead, the image and the entire text in the lesson are shared with the author and trusted source on a website completely different from the original post.

This form may sound confusing and not very effective. However, Sam Mallikarjuanan explained the benefits of this sharing in his article "Why Medium Works" as follows: Medium currently has about 3 million viewers, all are all sharing and reading content. Does your blog achieve this number? Otherwise you can target Medium's huge audience by sharing your exclusive content on their platform. As a result, people will pay more attention to your work.

At the same time Medium was born, LinkedIn (the world's largest employment social network) also introduced Influencers with guest blog features (influencers can write articles on this platform to increase their influence. and attract more users). By 2014, this LinkedIn program was officially available to all users.

Although the LinkedIn platform works a little differently than Medium - users are not comfortable re-posting the entire article - but it allows people to spread the original content to a stronger reader than it does to split. Share directly on personal blogs. In addition, if posting on Medium, writers also have difficulty in how to entice users to visit their own site.

Last month, the "father" of WordPress blogging platform has just launched the .blog domain and so far, users have experienced one of these most desirable domains. However, you will lose more than 200 USD for domain acquisition fees and other combined features.

The most impressive point of ".blog" is that although it is created by WordPress, you will not have to use this platform to build blogs on the new domain as before.

What will happen next?

You see, if you look at the development of blogging now it is easy to see that it has the integration of marketing and content strategy. If you know how to exploit, bloggers can increase the number of potential customers by up to 700%, of course, depending on what product you are advertising.

The change of blogging in the future will also change the work of bloggers and I encourage all marketers - whether being a freelancer or working at a company, use each blog for each product, private label or purpose. Although it will make you busy if you are cooperating with many different brands, if the improvement of blogging does not imply anything else, it will be like a sphere, can only continue to expand. but not shrinking.

Notice how Facebook Live, Facebook Instant Articles and Snapchat Stories have evolved compared to the simple definition of blogs written in the dictionary: "a website where people write about personal views, activities. my action and experience ". Replace the word "write about" to "share" and you can give a convincing argument that most of the current content sharing platforms - including social networks - are very own versions of blog.