webism today

Not to discount the fact that the word blog was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger, it wasn’t until the launch of Blogger on 23rd August 1999 that blogging really began to gain traction.  There is no doubt that the launch of Blogger by Meg Hourihan and Twitter’s CEO, Evan Williams was the beginning of a massive shift in media production and consumption that would continue to 2009.

If you look back at how blogs looked in the early 00’s, they were true grass-roots media. It was an opportunity for anyone to publish content easily on the web. I doubt that anyone had the inkling that blogging might become so popular back then, but there is no doubting the shift it has caused in the media landscape.

Today, it is difficult to distinguish between blogs, news hubs, online newspapers and pretty much any online destination. Blogs that started years ago have become media behemoths. Often with influence beyond that of “traditional” news sources. While the “traditional” news sources are and have been blogging for many years.

With all this blurring and convergence, where does it leave blogs? Anyone can still create a blog. So, in a sense, it is still grass-roots media. But there’s very little chance that any blog created today will be able to grow to the size that the likes of Gizmodo, TechCrunch and Mashable have in the short time that they did. So is blogging still what blogging set out to be?

Wired editor Chris Anderson made an interesting, yet rather pretentious claim recently in an interview with Der Spiegal:

…I don’t use the word media. I don’t use the word news. I don’t think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier. They are standing in our way, like “horseless carriage”

It’s a slightly baffling claim, but one I can see sense in. Print newspapers are dying; are the pigeon hole definitions we’re using contributing to this? Wouldn’t it be better if we stopped trying to recreate online what we had before? I think the same is true with blogging. Blogging isn’t dying, it’s stronger than ever, but can it really be called blogging any more, or has it changed into something different from what it started out as.

Anyway, I’m straying from my point. Blogger is 10, it has helped to revolutionise an industry faster than any other communication technology before it, and I think that is something worth celebrating!

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