How long has blogging been around

That is, of course, something we talk a lot about in the present day on our site, newsletter, and channels. In , Twitter gained steam and planted the seed for publishing quick-hitting ideas. At the same time, Huffington Post and Buzzfeed began to post on their respective sites and started to blur the lines between blogs and news.

By , there were over million active blogs online. Let that one settle in. In , Google made the game-changing decision to begin to penalize sites that were publishing low quality or thin content. All of a sudden, understanding SEO becomes a factor. Or, at the very least, the tide changed towards quality over sheer quantity. It also began to blur the lines between news reporting and blogging even further.

In , WordPress launched the. Now, around 7 million blog posts are published across these platforms each day. Just like the blogs we know today, the most recent links Barger collected appeared at the top of the page, pushing the older entries further down the page. Just one year later, a first blog was published on an established news site, when the reporter Jonathan Dube chronicled Hurricane Bonnie for The Charlotte Observer.

LiveJournal was founded by Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping in touch with his high school friends. Blogger was originally founded by Pyra Labs as a commercial platform and later acquired by Google, who made it free and available to everyone — a move largely responsible for bringing blogging into the mainstream.

This was also the year that the first version of RSS was released for use on My. RSS was and still is crucial for blogging as it allows publishers to syndicate data automatically and allows people to stay up to date with their favorite bloggers or news sites. As far as Xanga goes, it was originally intended to be a social networking site similar to MySpace.

The emergence of blogging platforms made it easier for more people to create their blogs. It also made it so blogging started to become taken more seriously. The beginning of the new millennium brought about another blogging platform in The platform in question was Moveable Type which was released as a self-hosted platform for bloggers and later introduced the Trackback feature the ability to alert blogs that you have linked to a specific post on their blog which is now widely adopted across all blogging platforms.

But what really marked the year is the fact that a blogger, Heather B Armstrong, was fired for writing about her coworkers on her personal blog, dooce. That event sparked a lot of controversy and raised questions about online privacy. Her blog paved the way for a niche that continues to remain popular, with over 3.

During the same year, Blogads , the first ad network that aims to connect advertisers and publishers, launched as well. However, WordPress officially launched on May 27, and had a small selection of templates and a brand new admin interface. The plugins architecture was introduced a year later which allowed developers to extend its functionality. With a decent selection of available blogging platforms as well as the ability to earn income from their blogs by placing third-party ads, many people started dipping their toes into blogging as a career.

Technorati, the first major blog search engine, was launched in Audioblogger, the first major podcasting service, was founded in The first video blogs started in , more than a year before YouTube was founded. Also launched in was the AdSense advertising platform, which was the first ad network to match ads to the content on a blog. Once bloggers started making money from their blogs, the number of meta blogs skyrocketed.

Bloggers like Darren Rowse of Problogger. One early event that highlighted the rising importance of blogs was the firing of Heather Armstrong, the blogger behind Dooce , for comments posted on her blog regarding her employer. By the mids, blogs were reaching the mainstream. In January of , a study was released saying that 32 million Americans read blogs.

The same year, Garrett M. Graff was granted White House press credentials, the first blogger ever to do so. A number of mainstream media sites started their own blogs during the mid to late s, or teamed up with existing blogs to provide additional coverage and commentary.

By , political consultants, candidates, and mainstream news organizations all began using blogs more prominently. They provided the perfect vehicle for broadcasting editorial opinion and reaching out to readers and viewers. In January , the White House started its blog. In , Google lowered rankings on low-quality or thin content, penalizing bloggers who used duplicate content or few reputable links. Medium, a new blogging platform, was founded, which continued to push the envelope for blogging and news reporting.

WordPress announced a new domain for blogs to take advantage of the rapid increase in this media form. Graduates learn how to apply critical analysis, creative insights and technological competence in their careers, so they are prepared for positions in public relations, organizational communication, social media management and more.

The program takes place in a fully online learning environment. Share on Twitter Facebook LinkedIn.