Blog

It’s unusual to have an origins story that’s only half a century long, though perhaps this one is entirely fitting for our times, a period when people are smarting and thrilling in mostly equal measure from constant media bombardment, when the average teenager has exponentially more virtual interactions than real ones, and when everyone I know feels like their life is as crazy and precarious as a high wire unicycle juggling act…

But I digress. Here’s one brief version of history (courtesy in part of Allison Carruth from whom I took a Writing 2.0 course through Stanford Continuing Studies):

  • In the beginning, there was nothing but live interaction. You knew only people you’d met and communicated with only those in the same time and space as you.
  • 1969 The internet was born, or at least two nodes were interconnected…
  • 1990 The internet begat its first website
  • 1993 Websites begat WWW browsers
  • 1994 Techno genius types began creating for their friends as short, personal posts (presaging Twitter by years). Though we don’t think of the 1990s as a particularly radical time, that may just be because most of us weren’t doing this then. We hadn’t even conceived of it, while those who were considered themselves as part of a sub or counter culture
  • 1999 The birth of blogging software, making weblogging accessible to everyone
  • 2003 Blog count reaches 100,000
  • 2009 Worldwide blog count surpasses 100 million; multi-author blogs (MABs) begin
  • 2012 November – I, the prototypical late adopter – make my first blog post