Blogs in Education

A Brief History Of Blogs

A blog, the short form of Weblog, is a personal Web site or page in which the owner can write entries to store daily action or reflection. Entries on a blog are normally listed chronologically and previous entries are archived weekly or monthly. Bloggers, individuals who write blogs, can publish text, graphics, audio and video clips as entry contents. Readers can search these entries and/or provide comments or feedback to the entries, which is called blogging.

Blogs were first used as a communication device between computer programmers and technicians to document thoughts and progresses during product building (Bausch, 2004). In December 1997, Jorn Barger started to use the term of Weblog to classify a few sites in which readers can input comments on posted entries. There were only 23 Weblogs in the beginning of 1999. However, after the first build-your-own-Weblog tool, Pitas, was launched in July 1999 and other tools like Blogger and Groksoup were released in August 1999, more people started writing blogs because these services were free and enabled individuals to publish their own Weblogs quickly and easily (Huffaker, 2004). In August 2001, a law professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville created a blog, Instapundit, which got 10,000 hits each day. In 2002, blogs on business appeared and got up to a million visits a day during the peak events. In the same year, blogs gained an increasing notice and served as a news source. Blogs have been used to discuss Iraq war issues and to promote communications between political candidates and their supporters. More and more educators created their personal blogs and attracted large number of readers. For instance, Semi-Daily Journal was created in February 2002 by J. Bradford DeLong, a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley. The average daily hit was 50,000. According to Glenn (2003), Henry Farrell, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, maintained a directory which lists 93 scholar-bloggers in 2003.

In 2004, blogs played a main role in campaigning for outreach and opinion forming. Both United States Democratic and Republican Parties’ conventions credentialed bloggers, and blogs became a standard part of the publicity arsenal (Jensen, 2003). Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary declared “blog” as the word of the year in 2004. Blogs were accepted by the mass media, both as a source of news and opinion and as means of applying political pressure. A blog company, Technorati, accounts that 23,000 new Weblogs are created each day. This is also reported as “about one every three seconds” (Kilpatrick, Roth, & Ryan, 2005). The Gartner Group forecasts that blogging will peak in 2007, when the number of writers who maintain a personal Web site reaches 100 million.