:: Life Of Dave ::

10 years on

According to the wikipedia article on the history of blogging, "The term 'weblog' was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, 'blog,' was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999."

I took a few more years to really get into it, although in 1999 I was already keeping an online travel journal of my time in Japan. But for the traditional blog it took me another four years. So, on January 25th, 2003 (ten years ago today), I posted my first blog entry: “A little experiment in use of web-based weblogging. What could be more fun?”

I'm not exactly sure what 'non-web-based weblogging' would look like - don't ask me.

I'm pretty sure this was the same day I got the software up and running, although more likely is that, the night before, I was up until 4am plugging away at it, and finally got it working after waking up at noon. Over the next ten years, the software was my go-to programming task when I felt the need to do some hacking.

One of the things that accidentally worked very well for me was that, because my blog was flat files rather than some higher-tech solution, the old pages still look the way they did when they were posted. This preserved, for the most part, both the design and things like the so-called blogroll. I noticed one of the links from 2003 was the Baghdad blogger, who was at the moment I was writing possibly the most famous blogger in the world. In many ways I felt connected to the other bloggers of the time - everyone was getting famous, either because they themselves were interesting, or because their situation was interesting, and later everyone was getting a book deal. It seemed like simply writing something interesting often enough was a ticket to fame. And at first it felt like a very exclusive club.

Early on, the blog felt like a great social tool - the long format meant you really felt like you knew the person on the other end, even if they were a work of fiction. Thinking about this today, it's interesting how this has evolved into the 'catfishing' in the news because of Manti Te'o. But outside of that, or maybe even including that, in the first few years blogging was our social network.

Today, blogs have evolved into the new version of magazines. Social networks serve the purpose of talking about your day, generally. And just like with print, long form has given way to short form. Even though people mock the 140 character limit of twitter, I'm fairly certain most facebook posts meet that length limit as well.

So what does the next ten years hold? I don't know. I like long-form writing sometimes, but often I'm creating a dedicated web page for it (like my recent how-to for creating a custom lightroom web gallery (still in progress)). But sometimes you just need more than a paragraph to express an idea. I also expect facebook to die, and some other social tech to replace it. I hope that will be something more open, allowing me to integrate what I say here into it in a more cohesive way than adding a link to it on my wall with a pithy comment. But truth be told, even if it isn't, I expect I'll still be back from time to time to wax lyrical on somesuch topic or another.