By Popular Request....

Ok, it was just Nattie Hattie. Here's the Under-30 essay I wrote on the topic of "History of blogging: 2000 - 2020":

Roots of the Modern Internet: The Blog Revolution

The Blog Revolution was one of the most significant technological events at the turn of the millennium. Though the actual events occurred in the opening years of the 21st century, its roots go much deeper than that.

In fact, the beginnings of this revolution go back to the 20th century when the people were increasingly turning to the internet to get their information and entertainment. During that time, such services as Tripod and AOL Hometown started appearing, offering free web space and user-friendly tools for creating basic homepages. This allowed even low-level users without any HTML knowledge to have the opportunity to mark their own little corner of cyberspace.

Soon, most of the regular internet users had their very own poorly-designed homepages filled with interesting facts about themselves, animated GIFs, hit counters, and guest books. The main problem with these homepage services is that though they made it much easier to create HTML pages without ever touching actual HTML code, it still wasn't easy enough. These homepages were usually fairly unappealing aesthetically, and when a page was created it was still just a flat page, no real opportunity for interacting with others through the page.

Then, in the closing years of the millennium, a small community of what were eventually labeled "weblogs" ("blogs"), began to spring up among some of the more technically-savvy web enthusiasts. Like the higher-end personal websites that the followers of the homepage craze wanted to emulate, these original bloggers set up their own sites, updating them regularly either directly by HTML code or via their own interface.

As this community grew, new tools for easily starting and running a blog started appearing, including Blogger, and LiveJournal. The original form for blogs was focused more on cataloging content found elsewhere on the web, then giving it some context, additional information, or simply pithy commentary. This evolved as people started creating original content with blogging tools.

Blogging tools created a homepage that was easy to update, which allowed for regular (daily, hourly, constant) updates by multiple users. Many blogging tools also had "comment" features built in, which produced something that was an integration of the homepage and guestbook concepts, allowing the blog's readers to make comments on individual posts. That increased the interactivity of the site and allowed for more collaboration.

The revolution grew users were attracted to the increasingly simple tools for updating their blogs. They could make updates from any computer via email, and even could create moblogs from their mobile phones and PDAs. This ability to add new content from any location, and nearly any electronic device caused blogs to explode across the internet. Users started maintaining multiple blogs, and were writing about anything, from the minutia of daily life, to hobbies, to global politics.

As the Blog Revolution came to a peak around 2006, mainstream media started to take notice of the would-be reporters and authors that the blogging community had created. Blogging was an official part of news networks' 24/7 coverage of the party conventions before the 2004 US election. Bloggers who gained a following and sparked the interest of mainstream media started getting book deals, which drew more wanna-be writers into the fray.

Around 2009, the Blog Revolution itself was effectively over. Blogs had so saturated people's lives that "check out my blog, I just wrote about that" became an acceptable response in social situations to the question "how are you?" Thus began the Blog Reconstruction period of technological history. During this time, the blogging technology and some of its related outgrowths, like RSS feeds, podcasts, and video podcasts, had spread far beyond the hands of web enthusiasts, and into the standard repertoire of traditional media outlets and corporations.

During the reconstruction phase, everything had a blog attached to it. Labels on products listed the blogs of the product developers and marketers responsible for it. Consumers could read all the details of how the product was developed and learn funny things that happened at 3 a.m. when on a deadline for completing the project.

When the blogs on the web had grown so numerous that they were choking all of the other content, a movement of people realized that it was unnecessary for everyone to have a blog about everything and it lead to an overload of information. They banded together and formed large, collaborative communities centered on a single portal for information.

These community logs (or "clogs") had members from across the globe who shared news and information, making them a more reliable and balanced source of information than traditional media. Eventually, the old mode of local news broadcasts and papers became obsolete, because more interactions were based on clogs, not geography.

One by one, the 24-hour news networks shut down and the talking heads of the evening news disappeared, as people turned to their new community for information. Television itself was eventually abandoned completely, in favor of the daily human drama that played across the clogs. Podcasts and video podcasts became the new entertainment and news sources.

The influence of celebrities and political figures from the physical world waned as the individual gained power in the clogs. A single person sending out the right message at the right time could start a revolution; of thinking and ideals on the clogs or of people and guns in the physical world.

Strengthening the connection between the physical world and the clogs, and breaking political and social ties based solely on geographic location were the beginning steps towards the world we live in now. Now, the "old guard" of the clogs that remain after the Clog Revolution govern the people. With the reapplication of another technology from the time period of the blogs, virtual reality, life in the physical world and wired world have been blended together into a single experience, the true reality.