Blogs, I barely knew ye
There has been quite some discussion recently as to the evolution of the Weblog… where will the next evolution take us? What can be accomplished through this medium? We have already seen blogs that are as simple as a collection of favorite recipes, perhaps an online journal of what some angst-ridden teen might be feeling at the moment… (MySpace, Diaryland?) but we have also seen the emergence of political blogs, environmental blogs, and even blogs designed to encourage the spread of Globalization and understanding between different peoples: http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/top/about-global-voices/
But the historian in me wonders if perhaps there aren’t some parallels which can be drawn to the evolution of the Internet itself that eventually brought us the blog. Growing up in suburban America, the first multi-user online communications tool I experienced was the BBS (Bulletin Board System). Back home in Rhode Island we had such services as the Ocean State State FreeNet (which still exists in a form today: http://www.osfn.org/), RINet, and a few others. These early systems of allowing many people to come together to form a “community” based upon shared interests and ideas served much the same purpose as blogs do today, albeit with some limitations. BBS’es ran on a dial-up infrastructure that was sketchy at best… communications were slow (My first modem transferred data at a whopping 9.6Kbps, as compared with the 1,500Kbps cable modems of today, haha), they were also completely text-based, were generally local-access-area only, and were often prone to failure. Still, there was a foundation laid for the multi-user interactions over the Internet for the future. For those that are interested, there’s a pretty comprehensive history of BBS’ing located here: http://sysopscorner.thebbs.org/bbshist.html
After major interest in BBS and the similar text-based USENet (Newsgroup) systems fell to the newly unleashed power of the World Wide Web, new communities took their place. Communities like AOL, Yahoo, Geocities (*shudder*), and others allowed Internet users to connect to a vastly larger audience to once again discuss hobbies, political beliefs, or whatever they really wanted to… in fact, probably too much of “whatever they wanted to”, given how many completely useless personal sites and communities there seemed to be back then. There was a lack of cohesion or organization, as hyperlinking was the only method of maintaining any network of communities which shared similar interests. Of course, the largest problem with these forums is that someone out there had to actually build the website. I built many back then, almost none of which still exist in any form I’d recognize them. Knowledge of HTML, the coding language of the Internet, was a valuable resource to be sure, as the supply of effective WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get, or graphical non-code-based) website editing software severely lagged behind the demand curve for more websites.
The advent of the Weblog and the software that was built around it to enable such features as trackbacks and easy-to-use templates changed all this. These days, a server administrator (our own Dr. Farrell) can basically get a site up and running, and then leave the rest to the users with very little interference. Blogs are more interconnected than the BBS’es and Web-Based Forums of the past, and have allowed users to bridge distances and cultural barriers that were never conceived of as possibilities before this. A decent and very brief history of blogging is available at: http://www.cjr.org/issues/2003/5/blog-jensen.asp another much more in-depth analysis can be found at: Rebecca Blood’s History of Weblogs.html
So where will the next evolution take us? We have already seen revolutions that have allowed greater and greater numbers of people to come together on the Internet to discuss common or disparate views. We have seen communications technologies within major industrialized nations expand to form an Information economy with infrastructure which is able to carry a tremendous load of data. We have also seen the software that allows us to communicate over this medium evolve from a simple local bulletin board to a complex web of interconnected and tracked communities worldwide. I’ll leave it up to Futureman to predict the future… I’m not so good at that. But I do believe I see a historical trend which could take us to some very interesting places. Perhaps more on this later.