The Evolution of The Blogger by Flowtown

Beautiful infographic of The Evolution of The Blogger by Flowtown – Social Media Marketing Application.

There’s one thing that bugs me though: It presents three types of blog formats (the photoblog, the vlog and the linklog) as ‘new blog forms’ that came out of the above mentioned type of bloggers. However, the linklog is one of the oldest forms of the weblog as I described in my thesis on Blogging for Engines. In 1997 Jorn Barger started “logging” the web with interesting links and commentary on his (now called) weblog Robot Wisdom. In an interview with Wired Magazine celebrating the 10th birthday of the weblog he clearly states that these types of blogs, linklogs, are the true weblogs:

1. A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you want to save or share. (So del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com.)
2. You can certainly include links to your original thoughts, posted elsewhere … but if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility. (Wired)

Anyway, enjoy the graphic, while I go and learn some humility ;)

In my 2008 thesis on ‘Blogging for Engines. Blogs under the Influence of Software-Engine Relations‘ in the chapter on the History of Blog Software and Blog Engines I wrote about Dave Winer’s role within the pre-blog BBS-scene and his DaveNet (1994) and Scripting News (1997). Back then I used the Internet Archive to track down the history of the early blogosphere and Rudolf Ammann is using the same technique. Dave Winer actually responded to his blog post on ‘Scripting News: Launched on 1 February 1997‘ that if we were to point to DaveNet as a blog (with its reverse-chronological entries) that October 7, 1994 is the day it all started for Dave Winer.

That’s 13 years of blogging. Congratulations!

Today we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the word weblog as coined on December 17, 1997 by Jorn Barger. In another two years we can celebrate the coinage of the word blog but in the meanwhile let’s focus on creating new pathways into the history of blogging. Instead of arguing about definitions and dates we should write more blogging histories as there is no single history of blogs and blogging. Michael Stevenson is working on one, I am working on one and Jill Walker Rettberg is working on her final manuscript of her Blogging book.

So happy birthday webloggers!

In the meanwhile I celebrated my birthday and got some incredible hand-made gifts from my friends:

1. My friends (including my non-geeky friends) often call me “the Web 2.0 Girl”

2. Notebooks for Random Access Memory

3. Extra memory and my avatar in pixels.

4. Control-Alt-Delete (if I ever lose my keys again)

I can only say tHaNK J00 9uY$, J00 4r3 9Re@!!