When weblogs began to emerge on the scene there was a tendency for them to be rather tedious diaries of the "Today I got up and I went to the toilet and I had a wash and I brushed my teeth and then I went into the shower and I washed my hair and then I got dressed and brushed my hair and then I had my breakfast and then Sarah called for me and we went to the park and we did handstands..." kind. All rather self-indulgent enterprises with an audience of one. But in the last few years the 'blog has undergone a revolution. The likes of Wordpress and Blogger now seem to dominate internet content. My bookmarks in recent years are increasingly contaminated by orange Bs and blue Ws. What has brought about this rise and rise of 'blogging?
I am rather of the Web 1 generation. As soon as I realised it was possible, I made use of my free webspace (we all seemed to have a bit of that in them days) and built myself a website. There were quite simple ways of doing this: Netscape, the browser of the day, came with a WYSIWYG webpage "Composer" (a modified version of which I still use for my website now as it's quicker than writing HTML); free web-space providers also existed, offering basic page-creation tools not entirely dissimilar to the box I'm typing this into right now. These were the GeoCities days: days of centrally aligned text, distracting tiled backgrounds and animated .gifs (horrors that would be repeated during the Myspace epoch).
As time passed, the .com bubble popped in our faces, stinging our eyes. The anti-competitive packaging of Internet Explorer sent Netscape use into freefall, and Yahoo! allowed GeoCities to crumble into dust. People entering this age of the internet were at a comparative disadvantage when it came to creating web content. And so it was that Web 2.0 stepped into the breach. A lot like Web 1.0 but bigger, sleeker, sometimes more corporate.
There appear now to be two kinds of blogs (the apostrophe becomes tiresome after a while and may be left at home): the journal of old, usually as a reflective tool (this kind of blog) rather than a tedious account of the day's events; and the content blog: not so much a log as a website, albeit a website presented as a constant stream of updates. Imagine an individual who, say, collects monkeys. Whereas once they'd've made a website about their collection, with a different page for each monkey, now it's a blog, with a different post for each monkey. The result is essentially the same.
My website is now almost 12¾ years old. Over that time it's been housed at five different domains. For six years it included a weekly column on TV and radio which was a blog in all but name and address. I currently have another weekly project analysing TV news hierarchies. What fundamentally separates these webpages from the 'blogosphere' is that they're owned and wholly created by me. If the webspace provider I use were to collapse I could just migrate everything elsewhere and nobody need know any difference. In the case of this blog, the infrastructure and framework are Google's. I just slot things into a form.
There are benefits to this, though. For starters, the frameworks are a bit prettier and better organized than anything I've written from scratch (though in most cases I could just borrow the same code and apply it at my own site). There is the feedback mechanism of Comments, which my basic webhosting does not support (although once upon a time we all had guestbooks that fulfilled a similar if more generalized role). Above all, there is the collective infrastructure: the most Web 2.0-y bit of all: everybody's blog connected to everyone else's in a great big happy blogging family.
I see a strange sort of ghettoisation of Web 1 at work; websites cast adrift upon the great ocean of Google. The days of Web Directories like Yahoo! are long gone. Web Rings that once linked like-minded sites have been abandoned for being ugly and full of dead links. Blogs, on the other hand, all new and shiny, feel like the Web of thirteen years ago: small, organized communities sharing links that aren't yet dead. Their formalized nature: a log rather than an undisciplined space, probably helps in sustaining the site. The centralized location on infinite mega-corp servers reduces the tendency for a blog to disappear into the black hole of expired domains. The easily available gadgets that allow joined up posting and links with other Web 2.0 applications are the icing on the fancie. The sheer ease of this sort of blogging over maintaining the same sort of functionality on an independent webpage is what makes the blog such a successful and powerful medium.
And that is why, after 12¾ years, I am here on Blogger rather than at my own domain, as I embark upon the first challenges of CPD23.
Why CPD23? Why not? I'm supposed to be writing my dissertation, so what better procrastination than something else that will help develop my skills as a librarina. And I see it as part of my habilitation into the wider library community, engaging in the shared experience of the 23 tasks! I'm still only starting to build up a network of favourite library blogs but already I'm getting gently into it. Expect to see my stained-glass mug among your comments some time soon! x
As time passed, the .com bubble popped in our faces, stinging our eyes. The anti-competitive packaging of Internet Explorer sent Netscape use into freefall, and Yahoo! allowed GeoCities to crumble into dust. People entering this age of the internet were at a comparative disadvantage when it came to creating web content. And so it was that Web 2.0 stepped into the breach. A lot like Web 1.0 but bigger, sleeker, sometimes more corporate.
There appear now to be two kinds of blogs (the apostrophe becomes tiresome after a while and may be left at home): the journal of old, usually as a reflective tool (this kind of blog) rather than a tedious account of the day's events; and the content blog: not so much a log as a website, albeit a website presented as a constant stream of updates. Imagine an individual who, say, collects monkeys. Whereas once they'd've made a website about their collection, with a different page for each monkey, now it's a blog, with a different post for each monkey. The result is essentially the same.
My website is now almost 12¾ years old. Over that time it's been housed at five different domains. For six years it included a weekly column on TV and radio which was a blog in all but name and address. I currently have another weekly project analysing TV news hierarchies. What fundamentally separates these webpages from the 'blogosphere' is that they're owned and wholly created by me. If the webspace provider I use were to collapse I could just migrate everything elsewhere and nobody need know any difference. In the case of this blog, the infrastructure and framework are Google's. I just slot things into a form.
There are benefits to this, though. For starters, the frameworks are a bit prettier and better organized than anything I've written from scratch (though in most cases I could just borrow the same code and apply it at my own site). There is the feedback mechanism of Comments, which my basic webhosting does not support (although once upon a time we all had guestbooks that fulfilled a similar if more generalized role). Above all, there is the collective infrastructure: the most Web 2.0-y bit of all: everybody's blog connected to everyone else's in a great big happy blogging family.
I see a strange sort of ghettoisation of Web 1 at work; websites cast adrift upon the great ocean of Google. The days of Web Directories like Yahoo! are long gone. Web Rings that once linked like-minded sites have been abandoned for being ugly and full of dead links. Blogs, on the other hand, all new and shiny, feel like the Web of thirteen years ago: small, organized communities sharing links that aren't yet dead. Their formalized nature: a log rather than an undisciplined space, probably helps in sustaining the site. The centralized location on infinite mega-corp servers reduces the tendency for a blog to disappear into the black hole of expired domains. The easily available gadgets that allow joined up posting and links with other Web 2.0 applications are the icing on the fancie. The sheer ease of this sort of blogging over maintaining the same sort of functionality on an independent webpage is what makes the blog such a successful and powerful medium.
And that is why, after 12¾ years, I am here on Blogger rather than at my own domain, as I embark upon the first challenges of CPD23.
Why CPD23? Why not? I'm supposed to be writing my dissertation, so what better procrastination than something else that will help develop my skills as a librarina. And I see it as part of my habilitation into the wider library community, engaging in the shared experience of the 23 tasks! I'm still only starting to build up a network of favourite library blogs but already I'm getting gently into it. Expect to see my stained-glass mug among your comments some time soon! x
Thank you for this neat summary - as someone more of the web 2.0 generation, it's interesting to hear what the web landscape was like a few years before I became aware of it. (It feels a bit like when my parents tell me about their life before I was born!) I'm relieved about the rise of blogs, though - I'm not sure I would have had the patience to build a website, nor get connected with other people who had websites.
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